FREEDOM

According to some reviews I got from the internet, Santana´s 1987 Freedom would be a "return to their earlier original sound". Maybe they were influenced by the fac that the famous drummer and singer Buddy Miles is back on the fold, and bluesman Junior Wells plays harmonica on a couple of tracks, plus the fact that old chum Gregg Rolie appears somewhere too. The cover of the album and its title also lead to that feeling. But upon listening to this record I get the same impression I got from the previous fiasco that was Beyond Appearances (1985): a producer´s take on trying to "modernize" the Santana music. So then again there they are: the same synthesizers and sequencers that were so ubiquitous at the time. For the second time it seems that Carlos Santana gave the "hip" producer the control of what would be recorded and how, at least most of it. The results are not as bad as the previous record, thanks to a better repertoire and the fact that there is only one singer this time. And yet, this is hardly the Santana sound we expect to hear.

Yes, you´ll find excellent trademark guitar lines and lots of latin percussion, but several songs are way too commercial, sanitized and bland to make this a really worthy effort. Love Is You for example shows the unmistakable style of a Carlos Santana solo, a real joy to hear, although the song itself is nothing special. The situation gets better on the second half of the CD, with Mandela and Deeper, Dig Deeper being the best tracks. But then we also have Before We Go, a tracks that is a pastiche of a ballad from Eric Clapton´s album August. If you know Clapton´s ballads of the period you get it.

So in the end I found Freedom not a bad album, it has its moments (if you don´t mind those typical synth sounds of the time), but far from anything he has done in the 70´s or even at the beginning of the 80´s. It would be a long way back to the top. Two stars.