Santana – Eres La Luz

Carlos Santana (born July 20, 1947) is a Mexican and American musician who first became famous in the late 1960s and early 1970s with his band, Santana, which pioneered a fusion of rock and Latin American music.

The band’s sound featured his melodic, blues-based guitar lines set against Latin and African rhythms featuring percussion instruments such as timbales and congas not generally heard in rock music. Santana continued to work in these forms over the following decades.

He experienced a resurgence of popularity and critical acclaim in the late 1990s. In 2003 Rolling Stone magazine listed Santana at number 20 on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. He has won 10 Grammy Awards and three Latin Grammy Awards.

Shape Shifter is the twenty-first studio album (thirty-sixth album overall) by Santana. It was released on May 14, 2012. This album is the first from his new record label Starfaith Records, which is distributed by Sony Music Entertainment, owners of most of Santana’s albums (except those recorded for Polydor Records which are owned by Universal Music Group).

It is also the first album since 1992’s Milagro that does not feature guest singers in any of the songs, a style that characterized Santana’s albums since Supernatural. The album contains only one song with vocals (“Eres La Luz”).

The track “Mr. Szabo” is a homage to the Hungarian guitarist Gábor Szabó, who released a series of 8 albums for Impulse Records between 1966 and 1967, and one of Carlos Santana’s early idols, and features a similar rhythmical and harmonic structure to “Gypsy Queen”, a Szabó hit from 1966 covered by Santana in 1970 as a medley with Fleetwood Mac’s “Black Magic Woman”.

Biography
Early life

Carlos Santana was born in Autlán de Navarro, Jalisco, Mexico. He learned to play the violin at age five and the guitar at age eight. His younger brother, Jorge Santana, would also become a professional guitarist. Young Carlos was heavily influenced by Ritchie Valens at a time when there were very few Latinos in American rock and pop music.

The family moved from Autlán de Navarro to Tijuana, the city on Mexico’s border with California, and then San Francisco. Carlos stayed in Tijuana but later joined his family in San Francisco, graduating from James Lick Middle School, and in 1965 from Mission High School. Carlos was accepted at California State University, Northridge, and Humboldt State University, but chose not to attend college.

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