He became known for his musical style that blended salsa rock, blues and jazz fusion styles: Who is Carlos Santana?

Carlos Augusto Alves Santana, better known as Carlos Santana, is a Mexican-born American Latin rock musician and guitarist.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he became known for his musical style that blended salsa rock, blues, and jazz fusion styles with his group called "Santana Blues Band".

Santana, who came to the fore again in the late 1990s, has sold approximately 80 million albums worldwide.

World-famous Europa and Black Magic Woman are Santana's works that every generation listens to with pleasure.

Carlos Humberto Santana Barragán (born July 20, 1947) is an American guitarist, best known as a founding member of the rock band Santana. Born and raised in Mexico where he developed his musical background, he rose to fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States with Santana, which pioneered a fusion of rock and roll and Latin American jazz. Its sound featured his melodic, blues-based lines set against Latin American and African rhythms played on percussion instruments not generally heard in rock, such as timbales and congas. He experienced a resurgence of popularity and critical acclaim in the late 1990s.

As the child of a family that immigrated to America from Mexico, Santana picked up a guitar at the age of eight and produced many classic rock albums with his band bearing his name, especially in the late 60s and early 70s.

The famous guitarist, who gained a large fan base with albums such as "Santana", almost every song of which is a classic, and the subsequent albums "Abraxas" and "Caravanserai", spent the next 25 years of his career as almost a cult musician.

However, he made a strong comeback in 1999, achieving the biggest commercial success of his life with "Supernatural", which brought together many famous artists and featured "Smooth" with Rob Thomas. Although "Shaman", which he released in 2002 following the same formula, did not achieve the success of "Supernatural", Santana is still one of the most respected guitarists in the music world today.

Interesting details from his life story

He was born on July 20, 1947 in Autlán de Navarro, Jalisco, Mexico. Being the child of a Mariachi violinist father, he learned to play the violin at a young age. Santana, who was introduced to different musical elements and became interested in rock music thanks to his family moving from Jalisco to Tijuana, moved to San Francisco after Tijuana.

Thanks to the guitarist Javier Batiz, whom he met while in Tijuana and whom he cited as his first teacher, he acquired a different style of playing the guitar, and thanks to this difference, he managed to stand out among his peers in San Francisco in a short time. The first band he founded, the Santana Blues Band, took the stage at the famous Woodstock festival in 1969, increasing its popularity in a short time, and Santana signed a record deal with Columbia Records.

The band's first album, Santana, managed to rise to number 4 on the American charts. Realizing that the Woodstock festival brought with it greater fame than expected, the band immediately released their second album, Abraxas, in 1970. The album quickly became a spectacular financial success, selling more than 4 million copies. However, Santana wanted to change the band's direction, and for this purpose, he added Neal Schon to the band, ensuring that their third album, Carlos Santana III, released in 1971, would have a more jazz-interactive and complex structure.

In 1972, Carlos Santana, who had the naming rights of the band, used this advantage to completely change the band's line-up and turned to a new musical structure that he called experimental, jazz-interactive, and mystical. The band, which portrayed an experimental image in constant search in the second half of the 70s and the 80s, did not have the chance to catch up with its former glorious days in album sales for a long time, even though it produced very high-quality albums.

Clive Davis, with whom he had previously worked at Columbia Records, came to the rescue of Santana, who experienced a serious decline in album sales and fan base in the early 1990s. The musician, who signed a new contract with Arista Records thanks to Davis, released the album Supernatural in 1999, with the contributions of legendary musicians such as Eric Clapton, Rob Thomas and Dave Matthews. The album, which sold more than 25 million copies worldwide, won 9 Grammy Awards in 1999. Supernatural, also known as the album that restarted Santana's music career, achieved a difficult feat by winning 15 Multi-Platinum awards between 1999 and 2009.

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The Epic Life of Carlos Santana

A tale of angels, devils, gurus, Tijuana whorehouses, buried secrets, and redemption after thirty years of rock & roll

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-epic-life-of-carlos-santana-89485/