Milestones: Abraxas by Santana
Abraxas exists as a monument and a challenge. It is the door through which countless entered the kingdom of Santana’s music, a kingdom filled with the ghosts and joys of the Black Atlantic.
At the cusp of a new decade, as 1969 became 1970 and psychedelic euphoria mingled with the sobering winds of change, the San Francisco Bay Area stood electric—a crossroads of rebellion, experimentation, and radical dreams. The air vibrated with tastes of new freedoms. The Haight-Ashbury haze still curled from porch stoops, while the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom pulsed with the heavy thump of bass, crisscrossed light shows, and a multicultural crowd hungry for some sound they hadn’t heard before. Into this unreal mix stepped Santana and Abraxas: a record that did more than challenge musical boundaries—it shattered and remade them according to a boldly hybridized vision, one that continues to echo through half a century of Black music, Latin music, and the broader world of rock and pop.
Before Abraxas could happen, the San Francisco scene had to open the doors. The late 1960s were California’s insurrection of the soul, an epoch when “corporate uniformity” collapsed under the ecstatic weight of community jams, activism, liberation, and miles of improvisational risk-taking. The Bay Area was America’s Liverpool, ragged in dress but regal in spirit, home to the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Sly & the Family Stone, Janis Joplin, and a wild mix of artists who played with, for, and around one another.
Here, musicians borrowed and reshaped influences like old hands swapping decks in an all-night card game: the blues from Chicago jostled against folk revival, British Invasion chord progressions met West Coast jazz, and raucous acid rock spun out into thirty-minute improv odysseys. Black music’s deep well—jazz and R&B, gospel and Southern funk—soaked every sound, channeling through bass lines, drumming strategies, and the inimitable San Francisco approach to groove. In the Haight, the counterculture thrived on difference, not sameness, chasing the mystical experience of togetherness—the “projection of joy”—over a marketed, easily packaged product.
Importantly, audiences were as hungry for variety as the musicians, craving union in musical difference, finding themselves in extended jams and the new use of space in popular song. The Bay was a scene founded on stretching chops, and nothing was less fashionable than predictability.
Born in Mexico and schooled in the border city of Tijuana, Carlos Santana landed in San Francisco as a young man, catching the first wave of this musical melting pot. His early ears filled with mariachi, bolero, and Afro-Latin polyrhythms—from Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaría to the basic street percussion of a weekend party. But in San Francisco, he absorbed everything from John Coltrane’s cosmic jazz to B.B. King’s blues lament, Miles Davis’ modal wizardry, and Jimi Hendrix’s molten guitar.
Santana quickly became the avatar of multicultural possibility, assembling the first brews of what would morph into a new Latin rock. His band was as diverse as the city—Black, Latino, white—rooted in Blues but pulsating with Afro-Latin and Chicano street drums, driven as much by the clave as by the wail of a Gibson Les Paul.
The group’s chemistry was visible to anyone who witnessed their life-changing set at Woodstock in 1969, where they delivered an eleven-minute “Soul Sacrifice” and burned themselves into the American consciousness. Just months later, their debut album stormed up the charts, but it was Abraxas that revealed the full reach of their ambition and defined Santana as the fearless fusionists of a new era.
By spring of 1970, the Santana band was composed of a set of streetwise, open-minded virtuosos: Carlos Santana, Gregg Rolie, David Brown, Michael Shrieve, José “Chepito” Areas, and Michael Carabello. Other contributors, such as pianist Alberto Gianquinto and percussionist Rico Reyes, added extra seasoning, but this core was the cauldron: six players with six distinct cultural reference points, all committed to creating group music that had no precedent on the radio.
The group bunkered down at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco in April and May 1970, producing themselves alongside Fred Catero. The extra budget and studio know-how allowed them to focus on sound: they sought to blend the rough power of their live shows—honking organ, unruly hand percussion, thick, tactile guitar—with the intimate possibilities of studio improvisation and multi-tracked beauty.
Abraxas drew its name and philosophy from Hermann Hesse’s Demian—specifically, a passage meditating on the shadow god, who is both mother and whore, beloved and despised, creator and destroyer. Abraxas stands as a mythic symbol of ambiguity and dualities—love and lust, sacred and profane, hope and melancholy—a fitting touchstone for music that refuses to be confined by either/or divisions.
The album’s cover made the statement even plainer—a deep dive into psychedelic Afrofuturism. Mati Klarwein’s 1961 painting Annunciation offers a collage of color, sensuality, Black beauty, and unapologetic sexuality. Here, a Black Virgin reclines amid surreal flowers and cosmic symbols, a bright angel straddling a conga drum—a clear assertion of African and Caribbean rhythms as sacred and generative. Klarwein’s roots in the Bauhaus movement, exposure to Dali, and immersion in California subculture made the work a perfect visual equivalent to Santana’s aural collision of influences.
The journey begins with Carabello’s atmospheric soundscape: shimmering cymbals, percussive wind chimes, piano clusters, and distant congas conjure both literal and metaphoric crying. It’s part meditation, part invocation—a spiritual cleansing before the party starts in earnest. From the jump, Abraxas declares itself unbound by pop narrative, setting a moody tone that’s closer to jazz or Afro-Cuban ritual than to Top 40 rock. Peter Green’s “Black Magic Woman” landed in Santana’s set by way of keyboardist Gregg Rolie, who’d been taken by the original Fleetwood Mac’s blues shuffle. But as soon as the Santana band touched the tune, it changed complexion: diverted into a Latin B minor vamp with cascading congas and a full-blooded Hammond organ, reframed as a true “bruja” invocation—part love song, part spell, riding the rhythms of Santería and the blues.
Gregg Rolie’s vocals delivered the lyric with haunted resignation:
“I’ve got a black magic woman
Got me so blind I can’t see
That she’s a Black magic woman
She’s tryin’ to make a devil out of me…”
The real alchemy, however, came in the transition: as the guitar solo unfurled and the conga pattern thickened, the band shifted gears, veering into the double-time rush of “Gypsy Queen,” a composition by Hungarian jazz guitarist Gábor Szabó. Szabó, blending Romani folklore with modal jazz, offered a melody full of urgent, circular motion—a natural fit for Santana’s drive toward transcendence.
Carlos’s guitar sang—never rushed, always bending notes in that inimitable microtonal style he learned from B.B. King and the old blues titans, but overlaying them with Latin inflections and harmonic choices unknown in Peter Green’s UK: call-and-response is embedded in the guitar/organ dialogue, while the percussion underlines the “spell” quality, the invitation to a trance dance. The song builds, not to a cathartic release, but to an ever-widening cyclone of intensity.
The tag-team of “Black Magic Woman” and “Gypsy Queen” moves from voodoo to jazz ramble, embodying the transition from conjured spell to wild, liberational movement: blues and Black myth, Roma drive, Latin sensuality—a cosmopolitan, Black music-informed reimagining that sent chills down the radio dial.
The third track punches in immediately: Santana’s recasting of Tito Puente’s 1962 cha-cha-chá “Oye Cómo Va,” an Afro-Cuban dance anthem whose roots stretch even further back, to the tumbao riffs of Mambo and the Afro-Cuban jazz craze of the 1950s. Santana turns Puente’s original inside out. An electric guitar replaces the flute—Carlos takes Puente’s lyrical melody and spins it with bends and vibrato hitherto unimagined in Cuban music. The block chord vamp, originally played on piano, is translated to organ and guitar, adding smoke and muscle. Rolie’s Hammond organ, with the Leslie speaker’s undulations, creates psychedelic overtones over the groove, and the timbales and congas lock into a syncopation that’s both tight and blissful. Despite its simplicity, the track’s construction is deceptively complex. It is San Francisco in microcosm: a jam that’s both collective and deeply individual.
No rock album had ever foregrounded Latin percussion as thoroughly as Abraxas did before. Congas, timbales, hand drums, maracas, and all manner of “auxiliary” percussion are brought out of the background and given equal weight with the drums, guitar, and organ. José “Chepito” Areas and Michael Carabello’s percussion isn’t tonal filler—it’s choreographic, insistent, drawing on Afro-Cuban and Caribbean polymeters that challenge and upgrade the typical rock backbeat. The kick-snare axis gives way, opening new rhythmic possibilities that invite listeners from all backgrounds—Black, Chicano, white, Caribbean, African—to the dance.
Michael Shrieve, the “rock” drummer, is jazz-schooled but humble, weaving his parts with the Latin maestros to create a “tapestry rather than a statement,” as he puts it. Meanwhile, Carlos’s guitar sits not only at the center of the mix but also as the pivot of the band’s musical language, delivering single-note melodies (more vocal than guitaristic), trills, and microtonal bends, often played with the tone and phrasing of a classic Black electric blues master. His sound is pure emotion; every solo is a journey, not a display. Gregg Rolie’s Hammond B3—modified and swirling with a Leslie speaker chorale—brings soul jazz into the pop form, echoing the Black church and the psychedelic den with equal authority.
Flash forward a couple of decades, and the conviction that mass audiences want difference was on the ropes. By the 1990s, the business of selling records had drifted toward compartmentalization—a “vertical” market where genre silos were the best friends of profits, and cross-pollination was seen as risky. Albums as eclectic as Abraxas—with their long instrumentals and Spanish-English lyrics, wide stylistic range, and Black-Latin-psychedelic swirl—were a nightmare to market execs weaned on focus groups and format radio.
A Santana record in 1995 might have been slotted into “World Music,” “Classic Rock,” or “Adult Contemporary” racks, but the sprawling variety of styles would provoke nervous glances. Yet in 1970, listeners and programmers were less boxed in by algorithmic expectations, more willing to let the groove ride out as it would, more attuned to the musical journey than the box it fit in. The commercial success of Abraxas stands as a reminder that sometimes, the market follows the music, not vice versa.
Masterpiece (★★★★★)