‘Santana would never again reachsuch heights of inspired musicality.’
Caravanserai (1972) by Santana
When people think of Santana it’s probably via impressions of Woodstock, hippy-dippy western vibes and eastern religion; psychedelic album covers with exotic single-word titles; melodic guitar solos with lots of percussion - sort of a latino-jazz-rock kind of thing with a multi-ethnic line-up; that instrumental hit (now what was it called?*); cover versions of hits by Fleetwood Mac and The Zombies*2; and The Big Come Back*3.
What may increasingly be forgotten is just how different and innovative a band Santana was. There are very few acts about whom it can be said that there was no one really like them before or after their emergence. Santana were such an act. Neither is it common that so rare an act should be so successful as Santana were: they appeared at Woodstock before they even had a record out and then went on to achieve worldwide popularity, topping the US charts with both their second and third albums, their debut having reached # 4.
This review, however, takes as its subject the point at which Santana’s phenomenal early success had peaked, with diminishing commercial returns setting in following a period of consolidation. Caravanserai*4, their fourth album, is, I believe, their creative high water mark, but it proved to be a turning point from which their sales would not recover until to the astonishing global bonanza of Supernatural (1999).
The Santana Blues Band formed in 1966 by Mexican dishwasher and guitar busker, Carlos Santana with Greg Rolie (organ) and David Brown (bass), another two San Franciscan street
Santana had ventured into the territory explored in Caravansarai back in 1970 on the first track of Abraxas, ‘Singing Winds, Crying Beasts’, composed, ironically, by the since departed Carabello. A piano instrumental exoticised by shrieking guitar, tinkling bells and a shimmering gong, the piece is essentially latin jazz with ambient and psychedelic overtones – a description which could also fit Caravanserai.
The album opens to the sound of crickets, joined after half a minute by a lone saxophone which breathily heralds a sunrise brought in by double-bass, bells, reverbed electric piano, drums and occasional guitar. Portentously titled, ‘The Eternal Caravan Of Reincarnation’ is a prelude which raises the curtain on a largely instrumental and segued record. Whereas Abraxas, with its similar opening track, had left it behind to develop the rock and salsa songs which came to define the band, Caravanserai advances firmly in the direction of a jazz-fusion sound.
Now, if you are likely to be alarmed by the suggestion of jazz-fusion due to challenging experiences listening to the likes of Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Weather Report et al, then let me try to reassure you. Santana had become fellow-travellers on that particular caravan, but their approach is more accessible, melodic and rock-based. Before the next Santana album, indeed before 1972 was out, Carlos would branch off into the kingdom of Coltrane with Miles’ English guitarist John McLaughlin, for Love Devotion Surrender*6, a much more rigorous and improvisational excursion inspired not only by free jazz, but by Shri Nimoy, the two musicians’ guru of choice. If you don’t like jazz-fusion then you should probably avoid that record, but don’t be put off Caravanasai which is a very different piece of work.
Back at the album itself, the second track. ‘Waves Within’ blends seamlessly into the first with a swish of tubular bells and revolves around a six note figure played by guitars and bass. This figure, repeated several times, has an unresolved quality about it and suggests that we are still very much at the beginning of a musical journey. Over the top of it, Carlos’ lead guitar plays spiralling patterns whilst the various percussion barrels and rattles away at the front of the mix.
‘Look Up (To See What’s Coming Down)’ has the feel of a jam about it with Rausch and Schon setting up a crunching funk workout redolent of Isaac Hayes, whilst the organ and guitar improvise around it. The bass riff here would become a staple of the funk and disco era. Next up is the first vocal track ‘Just In Time To See The Sun’, a brief, powerful tune which might easily have appeared on Santana III. Only three of the ten tracks have lyrics and they operate principally, I would guess, to add occasional vocalising as variation to the heady instrumental palette. As such, they’re fine, but we needn’t tarry here over their meaning or poetry because they don’t add up to a hill of beans beyond a few hippy generalities about love and redemption.
Carlos and Schon swap solos on ‘Song Of The Wind’, a classic Santana guitar instrumental which, on another album, might have been the stand-out track. In this context, however, it is almost forgotten after it ushers in the mighty ‘All The Love Of The Universe’, which closed the first side of the vinyl record, and stands as one of the highest peaks of the band’s achievement. A brilliantly structured seven and a half minutes tour-de-force, it announces itself in a maelstrom of phased power-chords panning across the speakers. Then a gentle guitar arpeggio with castanets and a profound bass lead into wordless vocals and eventually a sublime pop melody about global harmony decorated by splashes of electric piano. Joyous falsetto cries half way through open the door on a succession of solos on the back of the two bass players charging along with Shrieve’s drums firing off fusillades of rhythm. These torrid guitar solos, which feature terrific tremolo work, are joined by Rolie’s surging
If the first half of Caravanserai can be heard as a musical evocation of sunrise through morning and a hot afternoon, then the rest of it may be taken as a celebration of sunset and the night. Beginning and ending with Shrieve’s pulsing electronica, ‘Future Primitive’ picks up a galloping throng of congas, bongos and timbales complete with flamenco whoops. As with the start of the album (and the aforementioned Abraxas), you immediately tune in to the drama of the music and the sense of a stage being set. Two basses are again employed in ‘Stone Flower’, Tom Rutley’s acoustic playing the melody over Doug Rausch’s electric rhythm. Jobim’s bossa-nova tune is then given a scintillating make-over in an arrangement featuring a second keyboard and even more percussion than usual to go with the lilting vocals and staccato bursts of guitar.
The dancing continues into the night with ‘La Fluente Del Ritmo’ (which translates as ‘the flow of rhythm’), a showcase for Carlos’ rippling guitar and Tom Costner’s cameo appearance on electric piano (he would replace Greg Rolie from this point on for most of the 1970s). It is actually quite difficult to highlight individual contributions on an album like this because so many of the musicians are always contributing significantly on complex material which is so well arranged as to never sound inaccessible. Shrieve’s drumming and the assorted percussion playing is simply fabulous throughout. Let me say again here that the pitfalls of much prog-rock and jazz-fusion are not in evidence along the trail of this particular caravan.
The aptly titled ‘Every Step Of The Way’, at just over nine minutes, is the longest track and a worthy finale to all that has preceded it; although not classed as a ‘concept album’ Cravanserai seems to have been conceived as a holistic musical concept and works exceptionally well on such terms. The only track to be credited to just one composer (Shrieve), ‘Every Step’ opens with the most uncomplicated drumming on the entire record before climbing via Schon’s guitar and a metronomic cowbell ever upwards before the tension starts to crack, drums punctuating the change as Carlos’ guitar sweeps into a sunburst solo. The rest of the percussion races in with an orchestra bringing up the rear. A wild flute rips free of the brass and strings and Carlos goes off on another of his great spiralling runs as the orchestra, recalling the Gil Evans arrangement for the Miles Davis album, Sketches Of Spain
Santana would never again reach such heights of inspired musicality. They would stay with jazz-fusion for a while before drifting into the middle of the road, as had those other ambitious American jazz-rock outfits of the late 1960s, Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears. Santana’s early style had created an ultra-distinctive sound, but after Caravanserai, it ceased to be unique.
N. B.
*The famous instrumental from Abraxas was ‘Samba Pa Ti’.
*2 Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Black Magic Woman’ and The Zombies’ ‘She’s Not There’.
*3 Has any band ever had as big a comeback as Santana enjoyed with Supernatural (1999)? A full three decades after their debut, the album has sold over 30 million copies and is the biggest selling album ever by an Hispanic artist. Not only did it top the album charts all over the place, it produced both of the band’s only two chart-topping singles in ‘Smooth’ and ‘Maria Maria’ (the first a US # 1 for an amazing 12 weeks, the other only managing a measly 10 weeks).
Is it any good then? Well, it’s a very different band – stuffed with ‘guest artists’ ancient and modern (Clapton to Cee-Lo) – but apart from Carlos himself, not a single member from the 1969-72 heyday discussed above. But – any good? Yeah, by the standard of millennial blockbusters, it’s pretty good. By the standard of some of the characterless, synth-ridden AOR dross that Santana churned out through the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s, it’s a bloody masterpiece!
*4 The word ‘Caravanserai’ basically denotes a group of people travelling together towards an oasis with a desert inn featuring a central courtyard. I like to imagine the first half of the album as the journey there, and the second half as a concert in that courtyard before ‘Every Step Of The Way’ leads the caravan out towards their next destination.
*5 Curiously, Santana have never had a charismatic, well-known or even very regular lead-singer.
*6 The song ‘Love, Devotion & Surrender’, which appeared on Welcome (1973), bore little relation to the similarly titled album that Carlos made with McLaughlin. It is though, one the band’s best post-Caravanserai tunes.
Greg Rolie and Neil Schon left after Caravanserai to form Journey, another very successful band, although not remotely in the class of the early Santana. Their 1981 hit, ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ became the biggest selling song ever on iTunes in 2009 when it was covered by The Glee Cast, a bunch of ‘Fame’ style kids from a US TV show. Rolie quit in 1980 but is still on the road with his own band, but Schon is still with Journey. Even though they were on their way out, it is to the great credit of these two, that they played such an important part both as musicians and co-composers on Caravanserai. Mike Shrieve, an original member, made two more albums with Santana before leaving, still only in his mid-twenties. Most notably he formed the experimental jazz and electronica band Go with prodigious Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamashta, German keyboardist and drummer, Klaus Schulze, jazz guitarist Al Di Meola and Steve Winwood (who I assume needs no introduction). Shrieve has kept himself busy with various projects over the years and in the late ‘90s was part of Abraxas Pool with various ex-Santana side-men such as Rolie, Schon, Areas and Carabello.
Carlos Santana, through it all, remains a tremendously distinctive musician – one of the all-time guitar greats.
And finally a mention for the beautiful cover art of Caravanserai by Joan Chase – a departure from the busy psychedelic style of the first three Santana covers (all of them key images amongst that cornucopia of late ‘60s / early ‘70s rock album sleeves). That great orange disc of the sun low in a blue haze that encompasses the desert horizon and the caravanserai itself has always been one of my favourite record covers. Just as a great instrumental solo should belong to rather than distract from a piece of music, so a great album cover should evoke the music it dresses. Caravanserai exemplifies both these criteria.
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