Super continental
Jump-started by a mass of collaborators, Santana’s spectacular joy ride.
Santana ★★★★★ Africa Speaks CONCORD. CD/DL/LP
AFTER THE clunky Santana IV and 2017’s Isley Brothers collaboration Power Of Peace, what a pleasure to welcome a triumphant return to his finest form by a ’60s god, who on the eve of his 72nd birthday can still set pulses racing, hips swivelling and fingers air-guitaring when the stars are aligned.
No producer aligns those stars better than Rick Rubin, who once again jolts a jaded legend back to life by identifying the essence of what makes a legend legendary and focusing everything, from song selection to arrangement and the mix, to the task of foregrounding and spotlighting that essence. With Johnny Cash it was that cavern of a voice resonant with melancholy majesty; with Carlos Santana it’s his guitar’s blend of warm lyricism and blazing euphoria in thrilling interplay with irresistible rhythm.
Rock heritage fetishist that he is, Rubin summons that golden moment when
Santana first exploded in the immediate afterglow of guitar heroism’s most incandescent flame war. When The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Eric Clapton’s Cream criss-crossed America in 1968, taking the electric guitar solo to unmatched heights on-stage, Santana was wowing the Bay Area with an eclectic style that drew not just on those friendly rivals but a whole lot more, with the Woodstock festival and movie breaking him worldwide as a grandstanding guitarist who spoke to the emotions, not just the pleasure of spectacular stuntwork. The late ’60s flashes back most excitingly in Yo Me Lo Merezco, where the interplay of Carlos’s wah wah overdrive with Benny Rietveld’s bubbling bass and powerhouse drummer Cindy Blackman, soars like live Cream in full flight, and Oye Este Mi Canto, whose string-bending atmospherics echo the spacy Neptunia of Hendrix’s 1983… (A Merman I Should Turn To Be).
Yet this album supplies so much more than six-string showboating. Where the vocals on a Santana record sometimes just fill a gap, here singer and songwriting collaborator Buika commands the spaces which make each track a song and not just an instrumental showcase, her powerful voice – beseeching and incantatory, neither feminine nor masculine but both at once.
From Spain of Equatorial Guinean parentage, Buika hyperlinks to the musical
inspiration from which the co-creators draw.
Like jazzers with Broadway standards, Santana and Buika have substantially rewritten and rebooted songs from Africa; for example, Breaking Down The Door is based on the Calypso Rose song Abatina, while Yo Me Lo Merezco turbocharges the 1976 hit Blacky Joe by Nigeria’s PRO (People Rock Outfit). As passionately exciting as anything in the classic Carlos canon, Africa Speaks is an album of highlight after highlight, and that the 11 tracks were winnowed down from 49 offers rich promise that further volumes might be in the offing. Encore!