Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Carlos Santana talks music, social justice, Trump

Carlos Santana at Opportunity Village

Mark Damon / Las Vegas News Bureau

Carlos Santana visits and makes donations of musical instruments at Opportunity Village on Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2015, in Las Vegas. Alberto Kreimerman, CEO of Hermes Music, is at left.

Many people slow down as they grow older. But Carlos Santana, who turned 69 on July 20, seems to be speeding up.

"Well, I'm speeding up because I'm slowing down!" said the former Tijuana guitarist, who performs with his pioneering Latin-rock band Wednesday at San Diego State University.

"If you want to think faster — and play faster — you have to think slower," he elaborated. "I learned that from Wayne (Shorter, jazz sax legend and longtime friend). I am slowing down, in that I take a deep breath and feel things deeper — and, somehow, everything I imagine I wanted to do comes faster. I don't have to chase it. At this point it's miraculous to feel the things manifesting like this. The velocity is amazing!"

It certainly is for this 1998 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, who swiftly rose to international fame after performing with his band at the fabled Woodstock festival in 1969.

So far this year, Santana has toured Europe and the United States with the pioneering Latin-rock band that bears his name, released an album, "Santana IV," that reunites him on record with most of the former core members of Santana for the first time since 1973, and done several shows on a double-bill with Journey (the band co-founded by former Santana guitarist Neal Schon).

In addition, Santana performed the national anthem at an NBA Finals game on June 7 with his wife, drum dynamo Cindy Blackman. On Wednesday, he and Blackman joined forces with saxophonist Shorter, fellow jazz legend Herbie Hancock and bassist Marcus Miller at the Hollywood Bowl.

The five performed at the bowl for the first, and possibly only, time as an all-star band called Mega Nova. The concert represented a challenge for Santana, a lifelong jazz fan who acknowledges being in awe of the elevated artistry of Shorter and Hancock.

"You know, instead of scuba diving in any ocean, I decided to just soar in the sky," the mustachioed guitarist said. "That makes it easy for me to let my innocence or imagination fly, so that whatever music gets in front of me won't scare me.

"It's just (a matter of) confidence. Like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and all the great ladies, you're supposed to be able to complement, uplift, illuminate and utilize the gift of music to do the opposite of what Donald Trump is doing, which is to express fear. We utilize music to empower people in their own lives, give people encouragement of their own courage. We are the lions, and we can exist with sheep."

Special benefit concert

But there is another event Santana is involved with that is even more near and dear to his heart.

On Sept. 24, he will host and headline "The Ultimate Experience With Carlos Santana" at the House of Blues in Las Vegas. The event is subtitled "A Benefit for the Santana Telehealth Project, Sharing Medicine Across the Miles."

The high-dollar event is sponsored by his nonprofit Milagro Foundation, It will include a concert and a private cocktail reception with Santana, who will give one of his signed Paul Reed Smith electric guitars to each couple attending. Funds raised will go to the new Santana Telehealth Project.

The funds will jointly benefit Santuario de Luz (Sanctuary of Light), a medical clinic for children in the Jalisco, Mexico, town of Autlan, where Santana was born, and the Hospital Infantil de las Californias in Tijuana, the city where his family moved in 1955 when he was a boy.

"Carlos did a fundraiser for us last year in Las Vegas. He's a lovely, lovely man who just oozes sincerity and genuinely cares for the kids in Autlan, Tijuana and globally," said Telehealth project partner director Eileen Benjamin.

She heads the initiative for the San Diego-based Foundation of the Children of the Californias, a 20-year-old nonprofit. It serves kids in the greater Tijuana and San Diego region through Hospital Infantil de las Californias, a pediatric hospital in Tijuana. The Telehealth Project will enable doctors at the smaller Autlan clinic, which has counted Santana as its key benefactor since its inception, to visually and aurally consult in real time with doctors at the Tijuana facility. It will also enable patients at the Autlan clinic to be simultaneously diagnosed by doctors in Tijuana.

"We see about 4,000 kids a month from both sides of the border," Benjamin said.

"We're a humanitarian project that makes sure kids don't go without medical and dental care. We see a lot of children from San Diego, Orange County -- even sometimes from Los Angeles -- and from throughout Baja. Carlos built a medical clinic in Autlan, over 1,400 miles from Tijuana, where he grew up before moving to San Francisco when he was a teenager. He is a great humanitarian who has a great affinity for both Tijuana and Autlan."

Speaking from his Bay Area home, Santana almost sputtered when asked to recall what kind of medical care he had access to growing up in Tijuana as a child.

"None," he said, before citing one exception. "My mom. My mom's hand. The only medicine I remember back then was penicillin. ... Back then, we believed penicillin would heal everything. But, mainly, what I remember is my mother was the prime healer in our family."

Lessons learned

Asked what enduring life lessons he learned in Autlan and Tijuana, Santana offered an immediate response.

"What I learned is that Mexican people have their own frequency," said the veteran musician, who became a U.S. citizen in 1965. "And that frequency is that Mexicans are very noble and pure. We come to the U.S. and roll up our sleeves. We don't want you to give us nothing for free; we want to earn it. ... Mexican people get right to the essence of being connected to the spirit, and to the earth, and that makes us unstoppable."

Santana grew up in Tijuana's Colonia Libertad neighborhood, which had neither electricity nor running water at the time. The son of a noted mariachi violinist, he was in his early teens when he began playing guitar and bass in rock bands at nightclubs on Tijuana's Avenida Revolucion.

But before he dived into music, Carlos Santana and his younger brother, Jorge, would help their parents make ends meet by selling gum on street corners.

"My mother never realized this," Santana said in a 2000 Union-Tribune interview, "but my father pulled us aside, and said, basically: 'Don't come back until you sell this gum, because we need help with the rent.'"

Asked now how he recalls that period of his life in Tijuana, the guitarist replied: "I just wanted to be like my dad. He was absolutely charming, adorable and irresistible. I looked at him the way other people looked at him, like if he was Clark Gable, or Elvis, or a chocolate cake. I was like: 'Man I want what he's got!' I didn't realize I was born with it.

"I wanted to be adored. People still talk about my dad in the last places he played at in the Bay Area. My dad taught me that charisma is not intellectual or complicated. It comes from your heart. He could just look at you and you would melt."

This year's release of the "Santana III" album was welcomed by fans who were eager to hear most of the members of the band's most popular lineup reunite on record after 43 years. But the gestation period for the new/old album was a very slow process for Santana.

In 1988, the guitarist and band's namesake did a reunion tour with singer-keyboardist Gregg Rolie, drummer Michael Shrieve and percussionist Chepito Areas. All of them were on board when Santana performed at Woodstock in 1969.

In a 2003 Union-Tribune interview former Santana guitarist Schon said he was hoping for an imminent reunion of the classic Santana lineup. Thirteen years later, that reunion became a reality. What changed for Carlos Santana? What persuaded him, after all these years, to get most of the band back together?

"Neal's heart convinced me that he had, he has — the same thing I feel for Wayne (shorter) and Herbie (Hancock), he feels for me, and that is to be honored. I didn't see it then, but I see it now. And that made me surrender to him, and say: 'You're right, let's do something together, but with the original band.'

"He wanted to do something with a bunch of other guitar players, and I didn't see or hear that (happening). I said: 'Why don't we call Gregg, Michael (Shrieve) and Michael (Carabello)?' It was Neal's diligence to seek me out. For a year and a half, everywhere I went he was there ... and I just surrendered."

Santana lit up even more when asked about his wife, Cindy Blackman, who before joining his band had worked with Lenny Kravitz and had earned acclaim as a formidable jazz drummer and band leader in her own right.

"Cindy is a supreme affirmation that your prayers can be answered," Santana said. "I prayed for her and she prayed for me. And she constantly teaches me more and more about the articulation of this (music) and (such drums greats as) Tony Williams, Roy Haynes and Art Blakey.

"l love drummers so much, I married one! What she has learned for me is that quantity and quality can co-exist."

Harry Belafonte and social justice

On Oct. 1 and 2, Santana will perform at Many Rivers to Cross, a music and arts festival dedicated to racial and social justice. Organized by Harry Belafonte and his nonprofit organization, Sankofa, the festival will also feature such varied artists as Chris Rock, Dave Matthews, John Legend, Common, Danny Glover and Public Enemy.

"Harry has commanded superhuman respect from everyone and at every level for who he is and what he does," Santana said of Belafonte, who in 1985 spearheaded the all-star "We Are the World" recording, which raised millions of dollars to battle starvation in Africa.

"Harry and (United Farm Workers' co-founder) Dolores Huerta are the ones who should be running this nation, because they are magnificent spirits who are equipped to (achieve things) at this level. They can get it done, which is to bring peace. Let's replace the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI with equality, fairness and justice."

Santana's awareness of music's power to unify dates back to his childhood.

"My mother and father taught me that music is a vehicle to heal, to bring unity and harmony, to feed, to clothe, but especially to dismantle the horrendous lie that we're not worthy of God's great grace," he said.

His interest in social justice took root after the then-teenaged guitarist moved to the Bay Area. His arrival neatly coincided with the rise of flower-power and a budding counter-culture that he quickly embraced.

"The concept I learned in the '60s, here in San Francisco, was through (legendary concert promoter) Bill Graham and the benefit concerts for the Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez and Vietnam War protesters," Santana recalled.

"The most powerful thing for me, whether you are a musician or not, is to daily reaffirm that my light will see me through. In spirit, LBJ, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, both Bushes, maybe even Donald Trump, are the same guy. But (Trump) has no power at all over my velocity and my light, so I utilize music. ... We utilize it to invite young minds to not invest emotionally in being a victim of anyone, including themselves. ...

"When you remind people you are worthy of your own light, the next thing to say is: 'Use it. Use your light. You have it. Utilize it...'

"We are very effective, as musicians, with healing. The only thing worth doing on this planet is daily healing and restoring, bringing unity and harmony, and claiming once and for all that nothing is broken inside us."

Santana will turn 70 next July.

One of the key musical lessons he has learned, he noted, is to embrace economy and concision. Like his father and blues giant B.B. King, two of his biggest early inspirations, Santana said he has long sought to play fewer notes while imparting maximum emotion into each one.

"It feels like when I was a child I was already an old man, because I already played like that," he said.

"I learned that from my dad, economy. When people would say: 'How do I love you? Let me count the ways?' I'd say: 'Forget all that. Just give me a hug, look me in the eye and tell me you love me. You don't have to count the ways. You don't have to make it complicated.'

"It's the same with music. Since I was a kid, I didn't want to learn complicated scales or chords. I wanted to play two or three notes that made you forget your troubles and illusions, and drop your baggage. I just want to play the notes -- the same way as (singing) 'Ave Maria' and making love at the same time -- to honor the family and thank them for making us feel heaven on earth, musically.

"So I didn't need to go to school. I respect other people who have. But I didn't come to this planet to learn something I already have, which is to be true to a melody and then everyone will relate."

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