Santana

When you hit play on a 2-CD Santana retrospective, it doesn't make sense to do too much talking. Just sit back and let these songs speak for themselves. Besides the usual suspects, check out "Toussaint L' Ouverture," "Guajira" and the beautifully covered "She's Not There."

As great a guitarist as Carlos Santana is, his choices of songs and sidemen during the past
twenty years have been questionable, at best. The evidence is in this double-disc
anthology of his group's Columbia years. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, Santana
cranked out one gem after another, from the scorching "Soul Sacrifice" to Tito Puente's
sexy "Oye Como Va." But when the core of the Santana band began to fall apart,... More >

Columbia's Essential series dishonors a great packaging concept: two-CD best-of in single-size jewel box. Every title that isn't a priori redundant is either too long or, yes, too short; the second discs almost unfailingly home in on late schlock, especially misbegotten collaborations (hint: Willie Nelson's Hank Snow and Webb Pierce one-offs now occupy one budget disc). But the first disc here is long-winded enough to evoke a real Santana album but not so long-winded you won't give the next soundalike solo a shot, and so's its second disc--except for the dreadful patch in the middle featuring Scots belter Alex Ligertwood, a textbook example of how horribly wrong "rock" went in the AOR '80s. This clueless corporate greed, that clueless corporate greed--so different, yet so the same. (Grade - )