VIVA SANTANA!

For me Carlos Santana is the inventor of the exciting Latin-rock sound, I love the blend of his sensitive and fiery guitarwork, the powerful Hammond organ and the propulsive percussion (like conga's, timbales and bongo's) on his Seventies and Eighties albums. This 2- CD set is a perfect entrance to that wonderful sound, it contains 30 compositions including live tracks, unreleased songs and unreleased jams. My favorite era is his early work (first 3 albums) with an important role by Greg Rolie who added an extra dimension to the music with his Hammond B3 organ play and his very distinctive, a bit sultry vocals.

CD-1:The typical Latin atmosphere is great on songs like Guajira and Angel Negro: a Cuban/Puerto- Rican percussion touch with swinging piano, warm vocal harmonies in Spanish and Mariachi- like trumpet, added with howling guitar runs by senor Santana, goose bumps! In Jungle Strut future Journey guitarplayer Neal Schon delivers some blistering guitarwork. The Holy Trinity of Santana guitar, Hammond and percussion is great on the songs Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen, Jingo (super catchy conga beat) and Incident At Neshabur, what an exciting progressive blend of rock, blues and ethnic! On some short pieces you can enjoy solo percussion like Bambara and Abi Cama, I love it.

CD-2: In Dance Sister Dance it's 'Latin-rock-time', it rocks and swings with an awesome Santana guitar sound. In the 'classic' Europa he delivers his trademark, the sustain, it sounds so emotional in combination with his sensitive guitar runs, again goose bumps! In 1985 Santana had a monster hit with the Zombies cover She's Not There, he managed to change it in the typical Santana Latin-rock sound featuring swinging percussion and fiery electric guitar play (with some wah-wah). Other excellent moments are the compositions Evil Ways (a big hand for Greg Rolie on his Hammond organ), the swinging and cheerful Oyo Como Va (biting guitars and propulsive percussion) and the Woodstock version of Soul Sacrifice that lauched Carlos Santana his carreer, one of their finest moments all members showing their great spirit and skills.

THIS IS VERY EXCITING AND ADVENTUROUS MUSIC!!!

In those sad days for the Santana fan, each album reminding "the good old days" was very welcome.

This double CD features a combination of existing studio tracks (some being average ones like "Everybody's Everything") in an alternate version, some demo ones, a lot of live numbers of which "Persuasion" in its Woodstock version. From Woodstock as well, their inmense "Soul Sacrifice" is released here, but not in its long format (just the soundtrack number starting with the "Crowd Rain Chant" and clocking at 8'49"). The live ones are the most appealing to my ears.

A few new songs : "Ballin" which is a slow intrumental featuring great organ and good background guitar work. The track then kicks really off during the last two minutes. It turns into a frenetic number reminiscent of "Batuka". My preferred unreleased track.

"Bambara" is a tribal chant that sould have been left unreleased (but it only last for eighty- seven seconds). "Angel Negro" is a good-latin piece of music. Not complex, great rythm, poor Spanish lyrics. Average backing vocals. Not bad but not great. "Just Let The Music Speak" is a rythmy one : pop and not bad at all, it seems that it comes out of the Hall & Oates repertoire. "Daughter Of The Night" is a bit in the vein of "Angel Negro" : a good latin-rock song (with vocals in English, this time).

There are unfortunately a few useless tracks as well (as if Santana has not enough good live stuff to release!) : both "Peraza", "Abi Cama", Vilato", "Paris Finale" and "Bambele". All those ones are rather short (around fifteen minutes in total), which is not too much on almost two hours and a half of music, right ?

Except those, I must say that this effort is quite good. Three stars.