San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Jorge Santana — Malo guitarist helped shape ’70s Latin rock sound
Jorge Santana, the acclaimed guitarist whose music with the San Francisco band Malo helped shape Latin rock, died unexpectedly of natural causes on May 14 at his home in San Rafael.
His death was confirmed by his brotherinlaw Michael Vrionis, the president of Santana’s Universal Tone Management. Santana was 68.
“He was just the gentleman’s gentleman,” Vrionis said. “He was a gentle soul, and everybody that knew him loved him. I never saw him angry — he was never too high or too low, he was always just a calming force.”
Guillermo Jorge Santana was born on June 13, 1951, in Autlán de Navarro, Jalisco, in Mexico. His father, Jose, was a talented mariachi violinist, and his mother, Josefina, was a homemaker. The family moved to Tijuana and eventually over the border to San Francisco, where they lived in the Mission District. He attended Mission High School in San Francisco and grew up listening to blues music with his brother Carlos Santana — the genre was his first love.
In the early 1970s, Santana joined a San Francisco band called Malibus, which was later changed to Malo.
They rehearsed — “put in their 10,000 hours,” as member Leo Rosales said — at a club called the Nightlife in the Portola district, after which they caught the attention of a couple of producers and were granted a record contract.
The group’s lead single, “Suavecito” — which was on the band’s eponymous debut album of 1972 and has been called the Chicano national anthem — helped define the strain of 1970s Latin rock that had sprouted out of San Francisco. Santana’s characteristically gentle and soulful style of guitar playing was in many ways what gave the band’s music its flavor.
“He always described playing like going into a river and just letting the spirit guide you,” said Rosales, former Malo percussionist and Santana’s friend of more than 50 years. “Whenever he played, it was like he wanted his heart and soul to direct his fingers up and down the neck of the guitar.”
He was very spiritually minded, Rosales said, someone who wanted to jam through the song’s mistakes rather than stop and dissect each one. When he played, it wasn’t something he’d construed in his head — he let the spontaneity of the musical moment carry him forward. He may have been more reserved or subdued than Carlos, but that was because he was playing to the room, Rosales said — and his rooms were always more intimate.
“He was a very approachable person,” said Dr. Bernie Gonzalez, a dentist known as Dr. Rock, who managed Malo from 1985 to 2010. “People put these rock stars up on a pedestal, but people could always come up to him, ask him for a picture, speak with him.”
Later in the ’70s, the band started to undergo some changes — regrouping and economic issues led to some splintering within the group — and Santana decided to take his music in a new and solo direction by starting his own band.
Santana released two solo albums in the late 1970s, “Jorge Santana” and “It’s All About Love,” and continued to work on his own projects through the 1980s before rejoining Malo in the 1990s. He also joined Carlos on tour in 1993.
In the 1980s, Jorge Santana also did a short stint as an elevator mechanic in highrises around the Bay Area. His hands were his gift, and his work as a mechanic almost felt like the natural continuation of his guitar talent. It was also an extension of his care.
“He enjoyed fixing things and troubleshooting things other people couldn’t do,” Vrionis said, noting that he never stopped playing the guitar.
With his two brothers, four sisters and two children, the Santana family was large and his kin remained the emphasis in his life.
“I think every spare moment of his life was devoted to his children and their children,” Vrionis said. “He was a fantastic father to his son and daughter.”
Santana married Donna Santana in 1982. Their son, Anthony Santana, was born in 1984, and their daughter, Michelle Santana, was born in 1986. He and his daughter took annual camping trips up to the Sierra to a site called Camp Concord, for which he did fundraisers. The trip was a tradition that continued for more than 30 years.
He had a close relationship with Donna even in the years after they separated, when they continued to have family dinners.
Santana rejoined Malo in the 1990s, when there was a resurgence of interest in the band. Even in those later years of performing, he stayed true to his signature style: always getting to the venues early, most of the time first, interacting with the entire crew, tuning his guitar and getting ready for the performance. It was important to him that he knew his environment, understood the faces and names of the people he would be in the room with.
“He didn’t lock himself in a dressing room,” Gonzalez said.
Even though his musical contributions with Malo and skill as a guitar player shaped and put Latin rock on the musical map, the legacy of Carlos loomed large, though the two were very close and played together often over the years. A request for an interview with Carlos was not answered at the time of publication. At times, it was challenging for Jorge to carve out his own identity while still honoring the legacy of his family, which was embedded in the spirit of everything he grew to love.
Even after he stepped back from Malo again around the 2000s, he remained close with the band’s members — it was his second family — and in 2019, he began playing again with an offshoot of the band called Momotombo SF. The friendship they had built as young musicians in Malo had never left. Rosales said he always reminded Santana that the doors between them would always be open.
“I think what’s important in music is that the musicians really love each other,” Rosales said. “When they have that spirit, the music translates that — that it’s not a selfish venture, it’s a selfless venture. That’s what it was like with Jorge.”
The last show he played was with Momotombo, on March 6 in Chandler, Ariz. It was just a week before shelterinplace began, and there was an uncertain feeling in the air even as they boarded the plane — Rosales said Santana was starting to feel concerned about being on the flight. Then, a woman on their plane had a seizure and had to be given oxygen from a tank. Rosales and Santana just kept looking at each other in disbelief, then worry, then a bit of panic, but Rosales kept reminding him it would be OK.
Santana is survived by his daughter, Michelle Santana; son, Anthony Santana; brothers, Antonio and Carlos Santana; sisters, Maria Vrionis, Lety Santana, Laura Porras and Irma Santana; and grandson, Franklin “Frankie” Santana.
Annie Vainshtein is a San Francisco Chronicle arts and entertainment reporter. Email: avainshtein @sfchronicle.com Twitter: @annievain