What I learned from Carlos Santana

Remembering a genuine spiritual adventure on the legend's 79th birthday

30 years ago, jamming with Carlos for the first time

When the guitar emerged as the primary vehicle for my expression as a budding musician at age 16, I had a gallery of heroes that will sound familiar to any blues or classic rock fan: Jimi Hendrix, David Gilmour, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and the ‘Three Kings’—BB, Freddie and Albert. But one stood out as different from the rest: Carlos Santana.

Different how?

He and the Santana band pioneered a global sound, integrating Afro-Latin rhythms instead of just combining various American genres. He had a yearning in his playing, even at a young age, that seemed to reach for the heavens. He walked away from the popular sound that made him a star and spent much of the ‘70s exploring cosmic jazz fusion influenced by the guru Sri Chimnoy and spiritually-oriented musicians like Alice Coltrane. He was married to the same woman from 1973-2007, through the peak of his incredible career. Notably, he was the only one of those guitar icons from outside the US or the UK, hailing from a village in Mexico. Carlos, to me, was an outlier among outliers.

Here’s my recent Sacred Riffs video showcasing one of his best-known songs:

I never really thought I would meet the man, but through a series of unlikely events that now seem inevitable, I found myself not only jamming onstage with Carlos and the band, but working closely in the studio recording with him during Santana’s incredible Supernatural comeback era at the turn of the century.

During all of this, there were some truly wonderful conversations and events that spoke to the philosophy underlying his work and his world. Some of them were at the outer edge of my comprehension, but they were delicious all the same. Here are a few highlights and how they affected me:

(1) Carlos is an unapologetic seeker. He has explored the teachings of various faiths, blurring the lines between them and working them into his music. He talks a lot about saints and angels, especially Metatron, an archangel in Jewish mysticism, as if it’s the most normal subject in the world. To this day I’m still working at having this kind of intimate connection with the Other Side, and Carlos’ casual lunchtime digressions into his Metatronic encounters (which sounded like pure sci-fi to me) remain an example of a man comfortable in his spiritual skin.

(2) He has genuine respect for others’ faith traditions. When KC Porter and I first started working with Carlos, we told him we were members of the Bahá’í Faith. He wanted to learn all about it (all he knew was that Dizzy Gillespie was a Bahá’í), and after a deep conversation he asked us if we could write a song that reflected the things we talked about. This resulted in ‘Primavera (Springtime)’ which appeared on Supernatural. Carlos also sent me a copy of The Hidden Words, a key book from my Faith’s scripture, as a gift.

(3) He has shown extreme generosity of spirit. Whether giving me big moments to shine on the guitar at the Greek Theater or the Hollywood Bowl, or honoring my opinion on musical matters in the studio despite our age difference (and his legendary status), he always seemed to make space for the actualization of my potential. The ultimate example of this was when I told him I was nervous about giving raw feedback to him during sessions, and he said “Every moment of our lives, every choice we ever made, has led us up to this moment. Who are we to question that, JB? Produce me!”

(4) He’s all about the fun. The atmosphere around his creative process is often light, open, dare I say youthful. It felt like we were all lucky to be there, including him. Enjoying the privilege of spending the day messing around with rhythms and melodies, looking for the spark of the Divine in sonic form. It never felt like nuts & bolts. And when the moment demanded it, he could turn into a force of nature, playing a solo in the control room as if he were back onstage at Woodstock. I sat next to him during this a few times, and it was a lot of energy.

(5) He believes 100% in the power of music as a uniting, transformative force. He once told me that everyone has a light switch they can turn on or off, but artists have their hand on the breaker switch for the whole building. When I get bogged down in the ways of the world or the machinery of the Biz, I often go back to that pure concept of what it means to be an artist. To serve humanity, to direct energy, to call blessings down, just like Marley, Coltrane, Olatunji, Ravi Shankar. This stuff is no joke to Mr. Santana.

I could go on and on, but I’ll leave you with that for now. Working with Carlos Santana was a key period of my life as a musician and as a human being, and I still draw on it in various ways. I hope I can give back some of what I gained during those heady days.

They say never meet your heroes… but I guess there are exceptions.

Happy birthday Carlos!