Carlos Santana Biography

This Carlos Santana biography includes achievements like ranking 15 on the Rolling Stone's List of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time and, ranking 90 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists Of All Time published in 2004.

Carlos Santana was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998, and has made tremendous contributions to the concept of “world music,” these factors besides his unique style and top selling albums have made him on the most famous Hispanic people.

Santana said in an interview at the Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland in 2006: “My mission is to awaken people to a global heart.” For many of us who know the Carlos Santana music trajectory, it is safe to say that his mission has been accomplished through his music.

Carlos Santana's Childhood and Early Years

Any Carlos Santana biography that you read shows that he has had a clear love for music since he was a small child. He was five years old when he learned the violin from his dad who was a professional Mariachi violinist.

Santana was part of a typical large Hispanic family made up of his parents, José Santana and Josefina Barrangán, and six children: Antonio, Laura, Irma, Leticia, Jorge and María.

Santana ended up in Tijuana after his family moved from his native Autlán de Navarro in Jalisco, Mexico. He began playing at clubs and bars with various bands on the Tijuana strip. At the age of eight he decided to trade the violin for the guitar after listening to blues and rock & roll on the radio. He never looked back.

Any Carlos Santana biography tells you that 40 years ago this man, who comes from at least three generations of musicians, took the world by storm with his distinct sound.

In an Eye On The Bay interview in 2005, Carlos Santana confessed: “I just knew exactly what I wanted to be, how I wanted to do it.” He also attributes all he knows to his father and to picking up blues records. He studied and emulated the sounds of John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, T. Bone Walker and others.

In 1963 he moved to San Francisco where his family had relocated the previous year and started playing in clubs and ballrooms in the city. He developed his own style in the Bay Area, which at the time was starting to become a melting pot of various political, cultural, and artistic fields.

Breakthrough

In 1966, Santana’s Santana Blues Band makes its debut, playing mixes of salsa, blues, rock and jazz. Concert promoter Bill Graham discovered the band, and in 1969 it rocked Woodstock. People of all backgrounds seemed to like the band’s style.

Carlos' first album Santana featuring Evil Ways went double platinum. His second release Abraxas in 1970 sold four million copies and featured two main successes, Oye Como Va from the legendary Tito Puente and Black Magic Woman.

In 1971 Santana kept the fire going with the release of Santana III featuring songs like No One to Depend On and Everybody’s Everything. The band broke up in the early 70s. As Santana explained in 2005 in Eye On The Bay: “We were all very young and unprepared, you don’t know when to get off the stage so you start doing more coke or more heroine or more chicks or more booze… after a while you can’t play.”

At this time, the Carlos Santana biography tells us about Santana’s music experienced a different flavor with fusion jazz and Middle Eastern sounds, leading to the 1972 release Caravensarai.

In the mid-70s, he went back to his roots. The Carlos Santana biography by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame mentions about how the “Santana band periodically re-embraced its Latin-rock roots on such albums as Amigos (1975), Festival (1976), Moonflower (1977) and Zebop (1981).”

In 1988 Carlos Santana released a career-spanning anthology, Viva Santana, an album that he programmed and supervised. Soon after in 1990 Santana ended his 22-year tenure at Columbia Records, the company he started with. Carlos Santana signed with Polygram, with whom he released Milagro in 1992, and Sacred Fire-Live in South America in 1993.

Most of Santana’s unsuccessful songs in the 90s are evidenced in a lackluster Carlos Santana biography in the early and mid 90s. His records had poor sales and by the end of the decade he was without a record contract. Clive Davis from Arista records had worked with Santana before and encouraged him to join forces with young artists.

In 1999 the Carlos Santana biography got even more impressive when he rocked the market once again with his biggest hit ever Supernatural. A genuine phenomenon, Supernatural has sold 21 million copies with number one hits like Smooth and María, María.

Supernatural included collaborations with Bobby Martin, Rob Thomas, Eric Clapton, Maná, Dave Matthews, KC Porter, and others. Rob Thomas sang the first single Smooth which was embraced by a wide variety of station formats. Smooth, a Latin-based pop song featuring Santana’s distinctive guitar, stayed at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 weeks.

The second single María, María was another great hit. It stayed at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for 10 weeks in the summer of 2000. Supernatural swept the 42nd Grammy Awards in 2000, collecting nine awards –eight went to Santana- including Album Of The Year, Record Of The Year for Smooth,and Song Of The Year to Thomas and Itaal Shur.

In 2000, Santana also won three Latin Grammy Awards with Corazón Espinado and El Farol. The former won two awards: Record Of The Year and Rock Duo/Group With Vocal, and the latter won the Pop Instrumental Performance award.

In 2002, the Carlos Santana music path continued its success with the release Shaman. It won a Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals for the song The Game Of Love, a collaborative effort with singer Michelle Branch.

Continuing collaborations with a diverse mix of groundbreaking artists, Carlos Santana released his third album with Arista in 2005 All That I Am. In this album rock meets pop, allowing Carlos Santana to once again reach out to many audiences.

2006 was a quiet year in the Carlos Santana biography; he spent April and May touring in Europe while promoting his son’s band, The Salvador Santana Band, which opened all of his concerts.

Carlos Santana continued to collaborate with fellow artists in several projects in 2007. He is one of many guest artists featured on Kidjo's latest album, Djin Djin. The album has guest appearances by renowned artists like Alicia Keys, Josh Groban, Peter Gabriel, Ziggy Marley and others.

Carlos is also featured on Gloria Estefan’s latest single No Llores from the album 90 Millas.

In October 2007 Santana released his latest album The Ultimate Santana which combines hits from recent albums Supernatural, Shaman and All That I Am with early classics. From the 18 tracks 4 are new.

The overall comments from true old Santana's music style fans claim this new album to be a compilation of Pop hits piled over some of is earliest music. The album sold about 56,000 copies in its first week, reaching number eight on the U.S. Billboard 200.

Santana continues to play and perform but has not achieved the the success level he reached in 2000. He now combines efforts with Chef Roberto Santibanez in a series of upscale restaurants called "Maria Maria" besides his musical career.

Love Life

When Carlos Santana met the love of his life in 1972, he said it was love at first sight. In 1973 Santana married Deborah King who is the daughter of one of the most important R&B guitarists on the west coast in the 1940s, Saunders King.

Carlos and Deborah married in the living room of her uncle’s house in Oakland. They have three children: Salvador who is now following his father steps as a Latin instrumentalist and singer, Stella and Angelica. Afer 34 years of marriage Deborah filed for divorce in 2007.

Carlos Santana Music And His Spiritual Journey

The typical Carlos Santana biography is filled with dates and collections of great moments in his career but what many of them do not touch upon is the mystical approach he has in his life that has influenced his music.

In 1972 Mahavishnu Orchestra guitarist John McLaughlin introduced Santana and his wife to the Indian philosopher and teacher Sri Chinmoy. Santana was renamed Devadip which means "The lamp, light and eye of God.” Santana has said he feels deeply connected to the divine within himself and this feeling is expressed through Carlos Santana’s music.

But over the years, the couple grew disillusioned with Chinmoy and eventually, as Santana told Rolling Stone in 2000, “everything about him turned into vinegar.” Santana and his wife eventually ended their relationship with Chinmoy in 1982.

Santana has repeated several times in different interviews that he carries a mission through his music and in an interview with Modern Guitars Magazine in June 2005, Santana clearly expresses his message by saying “I would like people to understand this saying: May the heavens open up and the angels bless each and every one with the deep awareness of your own light.”

In most of his interviews he touches upon “the spiritual” if he has the opportunity to do so. In the same interview cited above, he may have revealed the secret to why his music is universal and appeals to people of many backgrounds by saying: “I have the courage to say I transcended and graduated being American or Mexican or all that kind of stuff. I have no allegiance or alliance to any flag or country.”

As Carlos Santana said in 2005 to Modern Guitars Magazine “Part of my message is: Embrace your absoluteness, your totality. If you can feel your heart you’ll be able to feel Apache…” Universal? the interviewer asked, to which Santana answered: “Universal. It’s a multi-dimensional Universe.”

Santana The Humanitarian

While writing this Carlos Santana biography I was not surprised to know that in 2003, he and his wife allocated the profits from the U.S. portion of the Shaman World Tour to Artists For A New South Africa (ANSA). The money helps fund non-profit organizations that combat HIV/AIDS in South-Africa.

They are also the founders of the Milagro Foundation, which operates out of the Bay Area to make grants to grassroots, community-based tax exempt organizations around the world that work with underprivileged children in the areas of health, education and the arts.

I am sure there is more to come that should be added to this Carlos Santana biography. What is very interesting about this multicultural artist is what he has expressed on several occasions, that big awards or money matter very little, and that what is important is the message of the music.