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The special Santana sound is back again with their second album featuring hard driving music with multi-rhythms. There are many musical changes on the album, but the appeal of body moving rhythms is still prevalent. The tightness of the group remains a Santana trademark on such cuts as "Singing Winds, Crying Beasts," "Se a Cabo," and "Oye Como Va," written by Tito Puente. Here is another big LP for the Latin rhythm king.
- Billboard, 1970.
Bonus Reviews!
On the debut most of the originals were credited to the "Santana Band"; this time individual members claim individual compositions. Can this mean somebody thought about these melodies (and lyrics!) before they sprung from the collective unconscious? In any case, they've improved. And in any case, the best ones are by Peter Green, Gabor Szabo, and Tito Puente, none of whome is known to be a member of the Santana Band. C+
- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.
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- William Ruhlmann, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.
This is where it all began -- the quintessential Latin-rock milestone laid the groundwork with moody, mystical arrangements ("Singing Winds," "Crying Beasts"), soaring guitar solos ("Samba Pa Ti"), funky beats ("Oye Como Va"), superb production and the best big percussion section in the business. Carlos created a rhythm and zone few artists have since equaled -- it's pulse-pounding get-on-your-feet-and-move music, and it makes a devil out of you. * * * * *
- Zagat Survey Music Guide - 1,000 Top Albums of All Time, 2003.
Santana were the pioneers of Latin rock, and their polyrhythmic stew combined with Carlos Santana's intense Bolero-like guitar soloing made them heroes to the progressives of every race in the late sixties and early seventies. Abraxas, their second album, was where they really came into their own -- the percussive forays, hypnotic guitar, and Latin rhythms inaugurated on their debut were driven to new heights by an expanded rhythm section and more focused songwriting. Santana, who were an oddity in 1969, became popular with Abraxas and brought the simmering sounds of the Latin ghetto into the mainstream. But along with it, they also carried hints of very professional-styled white rock, mostly courtesy of keyboardist Greg Rolie (who later went on to form Journey), who wrote the more conventional rock ballads like "Mother's Daughter" and "Hope You're Feeling Better." This gave Santana the proper mix of ethnic influences to be successful on virtually every level -- both as a pop success and as progressive innovators.
In the midst of the swirling Afro-Cuban rhythms that adorn Abraxas, there are traces of blues, jazz, and psychedelic rock. A perfect example is their adaptation of Fleetwood Mac's "Black Magic Woman" -- in the hands of the Mac it was a conventional blues, but in the hands of Santana it became a strenuous exorcism of raw passion and intensity. The guitar solo burned all over the airwaves for months, sealing Santana's fate in classic-rock heaven for ever after. "Oye Como Va," a cover of a Tito Puente song, was similarly transformed into a hammering riff complete with greasy organ learned in the dives of Oakland where the band earned its chops. Not surprisingly, it followed "Black Magic Woman" up the charts. Almost as if to ascertain its basic garage-band origins, years later, Olympia indie-punk realists Beat Happening would lift the riff exactly for "Redhead Walking."
The songs "Incident at Nashabur" and "Samba Pa Ti" were Santana's attempts at straight-up progressiveness, in this case the kind of noodling fusion that was being practiced by people like John McLaughlin, Weather Report and Herbie Hancock (all by-products of Miles Davis's innovations on Bitches Brew, actually). Over outstretched polyrhythms provided by the band's well-stocked percussive section, guitars and keyboards construct a mosaic of percolating precision, Santana himself would pursue this direction further, both within the band construct as well as with people like McLaughlin and Buddy Miles. However, it's questionable whether he would ever match the Latin jazz-rock fusion perfected on Abraxas.
The cover was quite an eyeful as well, with its slightly more-obscene-than-National Geographic nude woman reclined on the cover and liner notes like "we called her bitch and whore," which made a few hippies horny back in the day and proved that these were definitely the days before Carlos Santana's own conversion to Sri Chimnoy -- which is probably why Abraxas is the group's best album: It's a sinner's serenade as hot-blooded as a Latin sundown, a regular pagan's feast.
Abraxas was voted the 85th greatest album of all time in a VH1 poll of over 700 musicians, songwriters, disc jockeys, radio programmers, and critics in 2003.
- Joe S. Harrington, VH1's 100 Greatest Albums, 2003.
"Black Magic Woman," the Top Five hit from Abraxas, is definitive Santana: Afro-Latin grooves and piercing lyrical psychedelic blues guitar. It was a cover of a Fleetwood Mac song written by one of Carlos Santana's guitar heroes, Peter Green. The album's other hit was also a cover: Tito Puente's "Oye Como Va."
Abraxas was chosen as the 205th greatest album of all time by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine in Dec. 2003.
- Rolling Stone, 12/11/03.
Fusing African and Latin rhythms with rock and roll more successfully than probably any other recording artist of his day, Carlos Santana's second album, recorded at Wally Heider Studio in San Francisco, woke the world up to the potential of music that crossed genre and territorial boundaries.
The follow up to Santana, the band's hugely successful debut album, Abraxas is a mesmerizing record, with subtle, laid back grooves melding effortlessly with modern rock and all performed with a Latin twist. African rhythms are in abundance on songs such as "El Nicoya," while the Latin sound is ever present on tracks like "Samba Pa Ti." But the pure rock sound is never far away either, with "Hope You're Feeling Better" amply illustrating Santana's dexterity with a rock-styled guitar riff.
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As of 2004, Abraxas was the #48 best-selling album of the 70s.
- Hamish Champ, The 100 Best-Selling Albums of the 70s, 2004.
In the summer of 1970, 22-year-old Carlos Santana scored two Top 40 singles on a multiplatinum record, turned in a show-stopping performance before half the world at Woodstock, and earned a growing faction of devotees. Today, debut darlings are encouraged to regurgitate whatever worked the first time, but Carlos subscribed to the San Francisco freak-out scene, where musicians mined their imaginations and turned whatever they discovered into rock 'n' roll.
Santana did did the scene proud, crafting a sophomore record that voyaged beyond rock into jazz and salsa on the beat of a pounding Latin heart. Despite being the face of the band, Carlos and his impeccable guitar were merely components in a supremely gifted outfit, and on Abraxas, each member of the band made his presence felt. Gregg Rolie supplied the articulate, seductive organ grooves that made "Black Magic Woman" and "Oye Como Va" instant radio classics, and composed the stomping rockers "Mother's Daughter" and "Hope You're Feeling Better," with Carlos' signature riffs soaring high above. Bassist Dave Brown and drummer Mike Shrieve laid the bedrock of what was quickly becoming one of the tightest rhythm sections known to man, and paved the road for the exuberant timbals and congas of Mike Carabello and Jose Areas.
Upon the release of Abraxas, Rolling Stone opined that Santana "might do for Latin music what Chuck Berry did for the blues." When the album rode to No. 1 on the back of the tightest grooves the rock establishment had ever heard, it seemed even that prediction was somewhat modest.
- Matthew Oshinsky, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, 2005.
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