In his residency at The Joint, Santana and his band traverse 40 years worth of music, from Woodstock to Supernatural and beyond
by Jack Houston
Hard Rock Hotel 8 p.m. Sept. 1 & 3-5, $51 plus tax and fee. 800.745.3000 Ticketmaster
Shortly after showtime, Carlos Santana steps out from the wings, hops in the musical transportation module and sets the coordinates for September 1970.
With the stroke of an ominous, salutatory piano chord, the module touches down. Chimes glisten across the foreign landscape. A wild tambourine rattles. Cymbals swell in anticipation. Then the first, bent, ringing, unmistakable note is coaxed from his guitar. The spotlight illuminates the once-shadowed man, and something otherworldly, something supernatural, begins to take place.
For the next 15 minutes, the audience is rapt in appreciation as Santana and his band lock in and re-create with surgeon’s precision “Singing Winds, Crying Beasts,” “Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen” and “Oye Como Va”—the first three songs off the band’s second, and perhaps most celebrated album, Abraxas.
For the past year and a half, The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel has doubled as a stand-in for the San Francisco’s Fillmore West, where Santana and his original band—the one that conquered Woodstock with its star-making performance of “Soul Sacrifice,” before the band had even signed with a record label—rose from fledgling, third-on-the-bill also-rans to become the headlining act on the venue’s closing night.
Supernatural Santana is an encapsulation of those heady days and all that has transpired since—the original band’s chart success in the early ’70s, dalliances with pop, fusion and world music and, ultimately, the late-’90s commercial resurrection via his Rob Thomas collaboration, the Grammy-winning “Smooth.”
Throughout the nearly two-hour performance, Santana and his backing band weave a tapestry of sound that links these seemingly disparate experiences and influences. Three decades separate “Smooth” from Santana’s first top 10 hit, “Evil Ways,” but played back to back, they become one transcendent Latin jam, fused together by Carlos’ searing guitar work and the three-headed percussive attack of Raul Rekow, Karl Perazzo and Dennis Thompson. The shape-shifting set soon takes on a collective consciousness, and pieces of songs emerge spontaneously from the ether, flashbacks from an earlier trip: “Guajira” trickles out of “Corazon Espinado”; the 2002 track “Aye Aye Aye” drifts into a hyperkinetic “Para Los Rumberos.” Ever the spiritualist, Santana even detours “Evil Ways” into a version of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” that is at once meditative and celebratory. Coltrane in Las Vegas? In 2010?! Only one performer is making it happen.
The ghosts of Woodstock loom large over the entire performance, especially in Santana’s frequent between-song hippie speak promoting (among other things) peace, love and cannabis. As history tells us, the original Santana band took the stage on the festival’s second day, in between Keef Hartley Band and the Incredible String Band, neither of which is likely to command a Las Vegas residency anytime soon.
Under an overcast sky, the crowd that had gathered on Yasgur’s farm that day offered forth a repetitive, wordless chant to delay the rain and let the music play on. It’s unclear at what point in the festival the chant actually occurred, but on the official soundtrack, it leads directly into “Soul Sacrifice.” It’s a primal chant, one that cuts to the essence of music and of sound itself, and it’s no coincidence it appears 40 years later to introduce the song as an encore at The Joint.
If there’s one thing that Santana proves throughout a performance filled with instrumentals, Spanish-language songs and chants, it’s that words need not be understood in order to evoke a feeling of ecstasy, or impart a sense of community. Sometimes all it takes is just one syllable, one beat or one note from a stinging, singing guitar.
