Spirit Talk with Carlos Santana

By: Kayceman

Carlos Santana

The Earth-shattering impact of Carlos Santana on the music world is well known – Santana’s 1969 self-titled debut sold over two million copies, the landmark 1970 follow-up, Abraxas, sold over four million units, that “Soul Sacrifice” at Woodstock, the multiple Grammy awards, his signature guitar tone, the night he turned S.F. upside down with Trey Anastasio. This is all old news. What we gain from this intimate, extensive conversation with Santana is a look beyond the stage into his deep spirituality. We not only get a closer look at his God-given talent, his recent high-profile collaborations on Ultimate Santana (released October 16, 2007 on Arista) and his history growing up in Mexico, we also get a glimpse of Santana the man. Carlos Santana is not like the rest of us, he was touched by something greater. He is propelled by spirits and is in touch with parts of the universe few of us will ever know. Santana is a giving, kind, gentle and very open soul, all of which becomes apparent as he opens to JamBase.

The Spirit of Sound

JamBase: I wanted to start with the idea of spirituality. Where does your sense of spirituality come from? It always comes across so strong in your music.

Santana: I guess I knew, even before my mom and dad told me, that there was a divine purpose. When they took me to church and I was a kid, a child, a lot of that stuff didn’t make any sense to me, although I knew that God wasn’t Santa Claus. It wasn’t fictitious or it wasn’t Peter Pan, there was some kind of connection with a Supreme Being. It’s almost like when you hear a song before you actually play it. So, I started searching. Especially after the first wave of the Woodstock and the Abraxas [album], and you know, we hit really hard. For some reason I found myself craving a hug from God. So, I started playing John Coltrane’s music and listened to Martin Luther King’s speeches and Mahalia Jackson, and what everybody else was doing. You know, we all did it together, the stuff you get into when you get your first royalty checks. Then you go crazy buying motorcycles or drugs or chicks or whatever, you know? And I was feeling that I needed a different kind of hug than a physical hug. That’s for me where it began, where I knew that God was very intangible but at the same time very present.

JamBase: As a musician, how do you go about trying to sort of transfer that idea into your guitar and your music?

Carlos Santana

Santana: This is really, really a great question because this is the same thing that, whether it’s Eric Clapton or Trey Anastasio, where all of us are connected to this absoluteness and totality. Sometimes the mind gets in the way and then we start thinking that we’re this or we’re that or that we’re separated. The way it translates is that you take time to feel your heart. For example, your imagination is like a muscle. If you take the time to just sit down and just close your eyes and imagine things, it’s like a muscle you develop. That’s why it’s good to turn off the TV once in a while, and maybe not even read for a while. Just sit with yourself and get beyond the monkey chatter and beyond the fishbowl with a bunch of fish. Then you get to hear this voice, this voice that sounds very different than all the other accusing voices or guilt voices, or guilt, shame, judgment, condemnation and fear, which is how religions program men to feel less than worthy of God. Once you start hearing this voice it’s like a voice that is very soothing, very gentle, and is very non-accusing. And then you hear the music. You hear that music of John Coltrane or Bob Marley or Marvin Gaye that was going on. You start hearing the music from the other side, the music that is very good for humans because it brings a certain sense of unity and harmony. It reminds you, Aaron, that you and I, we’re angels, that we traded our wings for feet. You know, we’re beings of light. And then you hear the music. Then the music starts flowing through your heart and through your fingers, and then people know that. For example, when Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood did that song, “I have finally found the presence of the Lord.” You start hearing songs. And George Harrison, “Within You Without You,” or “My Sweet Lord.” You start hearing all the other songs that transcend rock & roll or Billboard. Yet they get in Billboard, but they have a different kind of message. It’s sunny even when it’s raining when you hear those songs. To me, spirituality is very different than religion. I got to have it.

JamBase: Sort of inline with that – and I do agree that there’s a great difference between spirituality and religion – but we live in a day where the idea of God is being used in some very compromising ways. We’re seeing people killed in the name of God, and we’re seeing our planet being raped and the future as we know it could very well be in peril. These are difficult times for a lot of people. Do these ideas and these facts influence your music today? Are you thinking about these things when you’re composing or writing or playing?

Santana: Yes. If you listen to the whole CD of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, he talked about it very clearly. For me, my reality or my perception of this reality is that any government or president who hears the voice of God and it tells him to go kill people is not God. It’s Godzilla.

Yeah.

Continue reading for more with Carlos Santana…

My dad taught me that there’s a way to connect sound [and] resonant vibration immediately to the listener’s heart. For me, it’s just fun discovering how to activate myself and activate them to a spiritual joy. -Carlos Santana

If you listen to real God, God is about compassion and mercy and unity and harmony. There is not future without forgiveness. That’s the first thing humans of all religions need to learn. I know that if we would send planes where there’s conflict, with brothers and sisters, if we would send planes instead of bombs, if we would send blankets and food and soap and medicine and kindness and kind eyes, I know for sure that it would work way faster. Like Doctors With No Borders. Fear begets fear. For some reason our government is invested in making every day Halloween without candy. And so I don’t buy it. I don’t buy the fear thing. I know that people who believe in Allah or Krishna or Buddha or Jesus, they have the same needs that you and I have, which is a need to trust, which is unity with God. When you don’t trust and you have fear you’re not in union with your own God. If you take one thing from this interview, just one thing alone, this is it: There’s only two energies in this planet, love and fear.

Carlos Santana by Jay Blakesberg

We’re afraid that somebody will get nuclear power or nuclear weapons, yet we have all of them. We have enough to destroy everything, but it’s okay that we have them, but we don’t want them to have them. So there’s a certain kind of hypocrisy about the so-called Christian Fox Network stations and Republicans, people who use God to achieve power. The ultimate result of fear is control. When you’re not in fear you know that it’s pure arrogance to think that one bomb can stop time, like Bob Marley said [“Have no fear for atomic energy ‘Cause none of them can stop the time” – Redemption Song]. There’s a legion of angels who, when they get an order from God, Mother Nature lets off a tsunami wave or earthquake or volcano. And Mother Nature, it’s not that she wants revenge, it’s just that she squirms. And when she squirms she’s not conscious of how many people die or whatever. To Mother Nature it’s just self-protection. My perception about where we are today is that this is the time where you, with your interviews and what you ask, you get to help ignite and activate light back into the brains of people and then you rearrange the molecular structure. That’s what Derek Trucks is doing. That’s what we do because we both come from Coltrane. I know he listened to Coltrane a lot, and Coltrane’s main function with his music is to awaken humans to a higher consciousness. We tried that with the hippies, and he [Coltrane] was one of the first ones, like The Beatles, whose ultimate goal was to uplift, transform, and illuminate the consciousness of people, all people, because of what was happening in Vietnam. Some hippies sold out. They came to San Francisco with fake mustaches just to get free drugs and sex and free food. But there’s real hippies still – American Indians, the first people of the land, and there’re still musicians who are deeply invested in utilizing their music.

Sort of taking that idea to the stage, you referenced Clapton and Trey Anastasio, and also Coltrane, who I never had the opportunity to see. I recently was listening to and saw the footage of “Soul Sacrifice” from Woodstock. There’s a clear sense that there’s something larger happening, that you’re not even playing the music but that something is going through you. I get that same sense when I watch Clapton when he’s really doing it, and Trey as well. For somebody like myself, that’s what draws me in. Those are the moments that keep me coming back. Because it doesn’t always happen, it’s not every night even, is there a way as the musician that you can sort of make this easier, allow this to happen? Is there something that you can do on stage that allows this greater power to come through you?

Carlos Santana

Yes. Thank you for asking that. I believe that doctors wash their hands with anesthesiology so the germs in your hands don’t go inside the body that they’re operating on. So, as I’ve said before, music goes deeper than the knife. So, we meditate and pray fifteen minutes before we go onstage, as a group, those ones who are receptive. It’s not mandatory. I notice that after we do it the music becomes more than the notes or chord changes or melodies. It becomes, I guess the best way to describe it is a wave of light that assaults the place, and from the first note people get up without [having to say], “Hey, how you doing? Get up,” or “Hey, everybody say yeah.” You hit one note and everybody gets off their seats, they start looking at each other and then they got chills. You see women crying and laughing and dancing, and you go into this kind of holy revival. And they’re not faking it, man. They’re possessed because you’re possessed. I’m very grateful to God that I have seen this many, many times, that the band goes into this from the first note and then we go, okay, this is going to be good. That’s the barometer, and we know that a two-hour or three-hour concert is going to feel like fifteen seconds, because the first thing that happens when something spiritual assaults the place [is] time disappears, gravity disappears, issues disappear. There’s a t-shirt that says, “We don’t have any problems. We just think we do.” The problem starts with the mind. If you take an aerial view of this planet, there’s actually a lot of beauty, a lot of promise, a lot of possibilities. You see the innocence and the purity of children as a whole in the planet. Once we land and we’re in New York in the traffic jam, you see the other stuff. So for me, music is like that. You take an aerial view of what you’re playing, and you can be in it but not of it. It’s kind of like going to Los Angeles but you’re not affected by all the plastic stuff.

Thank you for asking these questions. These are the questions that I ask Desmond Tutu, Mandela, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King. These are the questions that, for me, make a difference. You can do something from your heart, make a difference in the world and still be profitable. Just give it back because you can’t take it with you.

Continue reading for more with Carlos Santana…

It reminds you that you and I, we’re angels, that we traded our wings for feet. You know, we’re beings of light. And then you hear the music. Then the music starts flowing through your heart and through your fingers, and then people know that. -Carlos Santana

Photo by Jay Blakesberg

Improvisation to Collaboration

Thinking about the progression of your music, if you look at the earlier work we were discussing there’s a lot of focus on raw guitar excursions. If you look at some of the newer stuff like Ultimate Santana and Supernatural, there seems to be somewhat of a move towards a more mainstream, poppier sound with more vocals and collaboration. I’m curious how you see that dynamic and what sort of led to this stylistic change?

Carlos Santana by Jay Blakesberg

I got instructions around ’98, ’99 that this angel named Metatron was going to take me into a place, a new arena in radio that I’d never been before. From ’72 to like ’97, I wasn’t on the radio and I just played music that I wanted to play, which was hanging around Alice Coltrane or Wayne Shorter or Pharaoh Sanders. That music wasn’t getting on the radio, so I had years and years and years of knowing what that’s about. All of a sudden, I got different instructions to be gracious, grateful, patient and [to] stay open. And that people like Clive Davis [founder of Arista Records and current CEO of RCA Music Group] and Lauryn Hill and Eric Clapton, everybody was going to come over, and they did. All of a sudden everybody started calling, and when we would call some of them back they would say, “We want to work with you,” or “We know we need to work with you because every time I turn around your name is in front of me. It was like God telling me to work with you.”

And that was like Eric, Lauryn Hill, Dave Matthews, anybody, Rob Thomas [Matchbox 20], they were all saying the same thing. They never played my music on the radio, and all of a sudden I get in a cab and I’m blasting. So, my instructions were once you get into the center of the arena tell the world, invite everyone, to create a masterpiece of joy out of their life. Don’t be slipping and sliding and shucking and jiving. My instructions through all of this was not to be concerned what people think, because people are going to say, “Oh, you sold out.” I get a chance to be 60-years-old and to work with Kirk Hammett [Metallica], Yo Yo Ma, Justin Timberlake, Andrea Bocelli, practically anyone in the world from Buddy Guy to anybody who wants to share their heart with me. Why would I complain? All I have to do is just open my heart because they’re bringing a song to me. Whether it’s Chad Kroeger [Nickelback] or Rob Thomas, I mean, they write a song at home for me. All I have to do is be gracious and patient and grateful. Where I am right now is with the Ultimate Santana. It gives me a chance to do this. I’m also working with just instrumental music, no vocalist and just the music that I have done in the other 30 years. That’s going to come out next summer. We also jam in the middle of the set. We allow like half an hour to just, no script, just go, just because we love Coltrane and we love Pharaoh Sanders. So, how bad it is for me, man? I get to have my cake and eat it too!

In terms of performing live, you did mention that there are those 30-minute jams. Do you still get the same thing – whatever that thing is – do you still get the same thing out of doing that you did 35 years ago?

Santana

Oh, yeah. It’s like your first French kiss – it’s always awkward, it’s always new, it’s always innocent, it’s always fresh. There’s something really beautiful about uncertainty. Or as Wayne Shorter calls it, “backwards leapfrog into the unknown.” If somebody invites me to jam, whether it’s Widespread Panic or whatever, man, I can jam. I can definitely go there because I do this sort of thing so much that I’m actually craving to just get onstage with Derek Trucks or Robben Ford and just bug out.

You’re clearly one of the most important guitarists that we’ve ever seen. Has your approach to the guitar changed at all as your career has developed? Have you seen what you do differently? Do you see new options? Has the manner in which you play guitar changed?

No. My objective is to make a melody a real hug. A real, real hug, or as Wayne Shorter would say, “Don’t go around the block. Get inside the sheets. Really visit the note.” They tell me I play a lot of Dorian scales. The only Dorian I know was a girl at junior high school, that’s about it. Like Buddy Guy, I don’t really pay too much attention to the theory of music or chord changes or this or that. I can hear the melody and whatever you put in front of me, and I think that’s enough. I’m not saying that ignorance is bliss. It’s just that Wes Montgomery and Louis Armstrong couldn’t read a lick, man. But there it is.

Continue reading for more with Carlos Santana…

We know that a two-hour or three-hour concert is going to feel like fifteen seconds, because the first thing that happens when something spiritual assaults the place, time disappears. Gravity disappears. Issues disappear. -Carlos Santana

The Future: Electric Church Music

When we were discussing the past few albums, about how you sort of received a message influencing you towards that direction, do you have any sense what the next ten years might bring us?

Carlos Santana

Yes. The music that I want to play is music that is all-inclusive, music that will be able to continue to bring the walls down, like Berlin, to go to Cuba and play there with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, music that has the rhythms of Africa, the melodies of Europe. For example, there’s something really victorious when you go “da, da… [sings “La Marseillaise”].” When you play music from Sun Ra, which is really bug-out music, like a supernova exploding in front of you and you hear angels and beginnings and endings. Stravinsky and James Brown and Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix with feedback, all of ’em, there’s a certain music that sounds like 2001 [2001: A Space Odyssey] when all the colors assault you and you’re going like a gazillion miles an hour and, at the same time, you’re standing still. You know what I’m talking about?

I do, yeah. Absolutely.

That’s the music that I want to play around the corner, along with On The Corner [by] Miles Davis. I’d like to work very, very soon with Bill Laswell. I’m hearing the music already. This one is very solid and is very kingly, very royal, very regal. It’s influenced a lot by Manitas de Plata, a flamenco guitar player who was like the flamenco John Lee Hooker, very raw. I want to play music that’s kind of like celestial hymns. Jimi Hendrix was going that way because he was calling it electric church music. Duke Ellington, before he died he had the Bible on one hand and sheet music on another, and he was doing sacred concerts. I’m just following the script that is given to me, and after a while you can only do what you do. Then, God calls you to do something else and play music that would bring a commonality to all humans and back into their own light.

Our conversation has really revolved around this idea of spirituality, and you’ve discussed how you quite literally, it sounds like, hear guidance or feel guidance from something above or something bigger than ourselves. There have been times in my life where I’ve felt that push. Do you have any sense for why you’re so open to that? I think that that may exist for everyone but maybe there’s noise that doesn’t allow us to hear it. Do you know why you’re able to receive that message when some others aren’t?

Carlos Santana

I was born with a hunger and a thirst to not let go of God’s hand when I cross the street. For example, I never play music for money. I never play music to pick up chicks. I never play music to do anything like that, to be famous in show business or entertainment. I just wanted to be adored because people adored my father. When I was five-years-old and saw how women and men and children and old people just adored my father’s eyes and his voice and his violin. I just said, “That’s what I want. I want to be adored like my dad.” And he taught me how to, with the violin, how to talk to birds. He would go like, [whistles]. He goes, “Watch this. Mira, mira.” He grabbed the violin and he played, [and] he’d do certain things with the bow and the violin, and then these birds come over and start looking at dad, moving their heads back and forth. Then they start whistling back what he was saying. When I was five or seven-years-old he did that to me. He freaked me out. It’s like he showed me the code. There’s a way through sounds to communicate with birds and people and plants and just, “Here’s the code, man.” Here’s the universal tone, which is who I am. I am a universal tone like Bob Marley and Coltrane. In one note, people know who I am.

Absolutely.

My dad taught me that there’s a way to connect sound [and] resonant vibration immediately to the listener’s heart. For me, it’s just fun discovering how to activate myself and activate them to a spiritual joy, to celebrate and not to think like a villain or a victim.

You moved from Mexico to San Francisco. I live in San Francisco and I’ve lived here for a number of years, and I have felt more at home here than any place I’ve ever been. I wasn’t born here but it is my home. You’ve obviously stayed in the Bay Area for a long time, do you feel like this area has affected your music? Has it affected you as a person?

Absolutely. The Bay Area is not even the United States. The United States can’t stand San Francisco because we think outside the box. We’re the ones that say the world is round and they say the world is flat. We are the Atlantis of the Bay. There’s more artists than con artists per block, per person. The Bay Area, since I’ve been here, gravitates to consciousness revolution – The Black Panthers, the hippies. The United Nations was founded here in San Francisco. So, yes, I feel very blessed to live in the Bay Area because there’s more artists. Plus, in San Francisco or the Bay Area people don’t walk around auditioning for a part, man. We passed the audition. In L.A. everybody’s sucking their cheeks and trying to be discovered. We don’t want to be discovered. We know who we are, and we like it.

Do you think that music has the power to really change the world, to reach beyond the people who are passionate about music? Can music change the world?

Carlos Santana

Yes. I will bet you anything that if you put selective music by spiritual musicians on elevators and shopping malls there would be less Columbines, there would be less postals, less rape, less crime. When you’re stuck in an elevator and you’re ready to go postal and you hear “A Love Supreme” or “One Love” or “What’s Going On” or “Blowing in the Wind” or “Imagine” you can’t fucking do anything stupid anymore.

You’re right.

It won’t permit you, man. Your molecules obey the sound of divinity. If you just compile a CD [of] “What’s Going On,” “Imagine,” “One Love,” “A Change is Gonna Come,” Sam Cook, you know, and you play it in shopping malls continuously I bet you anywhere in the world people would stop fighting and stop stealing and stop raping, because molecules obey the sound of divinity. That’s just the way it is. Just like, excuse the expression, when you’re 17-years-old and you see something beautiful and you get excited, all the blood rushes to your penis. I’m talking about physical molecules. I’m not talking about the sex or the squirming, the giggling, stupid stuff. I’m talking about the order [of things]. There’s a sense of order in this planet. If we would consciously go to Seattle, where they program the Muzaks of all the elevators and hotels in the cities, and say, “We want you to try this just for 24 hours. Just play this kind of music, these 27 songs,” you would see an incredible difference in human being behavior.

This spawned another thought. We were talking about some of the collaborations that are easier to get onto the radio than fifteen-minute jams from the ’70s. I mean that stuff isn’t going to find its way to the radio. Do you think that that was potentially part of why you went in that direction or part of why you were told to go in that direction? Because if we can get your music on the radio – and I don’t mean to downplay the quality of that music, it might not be my favorite but it’s still quality music – do you think that getting that, returning to the radio, can sort of get that to more people and potentially make somewhat of a shift?

Well, in the words of Malcolm X, “By any means necessary.” As long as it’s with grace and without brutality, you should assault the senses of the listener. My instructions are get on the radio, work with Clive Davis, work with J. Lo, work with Justin Timberlake. You will have a chance to play with McCoy Tyner and Trey Anastasio and all that. We’re all children of God, anyway. But, if you get a chance get on the radio. Prince himself told me, “Because of you, I get to play more guitar.” For a while they wouldn’t play guitar on the radio, man. There wouldn’t be no guitar solos on the radio. The sound of Prince’s guitar or Eric Clapton’s guitar or Derek Trucks’ guitar, it’s all about choices. I don’t know if Derek wants to get on the radio. Some people don’t want to get into radio. They want to stay, quote-unquote, pure. Miles didn’t have a problem playing “Human Nature” or “Time After Time,” and Coltrane didn’t have a problem playing “My Favorite Things.” So, why should I get a little snobby and shit about thinking that my stuff is too good to get on the radio?

JamBase | Holy Spheres
Go See Live Music!