With Carlos Santana, “spirit” is always the operative term. He feels the spirit, he exudes spirituality, and his life is always swirling, wafting around like a spirit from a different dimension.
His music, too, seems happily circuitous: No beginning, no charted path, no apparent destination. It’s just one long and groovy jam for the guitar legend, back at House of Blues on Friday and Saturday and again Feb. 3-6.
Santana also has traveled back in time, far back, to reunite his band from the 1971 album “Santana III.” That oft-discussed release, “Santana IV,” is out April 15 and features Santana back in creative mode with Neal Schon, Gregg Rolie, Michael Carabello and Michael Shrieve.
The first single from that album, “Anywhere You Want to Go,” is out Feb. 5. Santana has shuffled his onstage lineup significantly since his most recent HOB appearances last fall.
Most notably, his wife, Cindy Blackman, is back onstage as the band’s full-time drummer, stepping in for Las Vegas vet Pepe Jimenez of Santa Fe & The Fat City Horns, who performed behind Santana for nearly four years.
He also has swapped vocalists, with Ray Greene (who had been with Tower of Power “for about a minute,” as musicians say) moving in for longtime singer Tony Lindsey.
Santana talked of all these spirited developments during an interview at his office and rehearsal studio in Las Vegas. But first, he was reminded that a fellow Woodstock grad, John Fogerty, also has taken a gig on the Strip — Fogerty is back at Venetian Theater in September.
At the mention of Fogerty’s name, Santana beamed.
“We haven’t played together since … lemme remember, it was ’68, Santa Clara Fairgrounds,” Santana recalled. “We opened for Creedence Clearwater back then. That’s when we first started out with him. We used to open for them, Steppenwolf, everybody … I want to play ‘You Put a Spell on Me’ with him. Oooh, man …”
Maybe that can be arranged?
More from a characteristically spiritual chat with the HOB headliner:
The difference between playing with bandmates for “Santana IV” compared to “Santana III” in 1971 was “gratitude and appreciation”:
“Wisdom comes with age, and wisdom gives you appreciation instead of entitlement. I think, in that room, everybody was grateful to be in each other’s presence,” Santana says. “To be able to bring out of each other something they couldn’t bring out of themselves, that chemistry that you need to make beautiful music.
“It’s like, as you know, The Rolling Stones have tried it without each other. But as soon as you put Keith Richards with Mick Jagger, or when you had John Lennon with Paul McCartney, there is a chemistry there. There is a chemistry in Santana, as soon as you go into the room, nobody has to do anything other than breathe and play.”
The mention of Cindy’s name makes him go, “Yeaaah!”:
Blackman was with the Lenny Kravitz band when she met Santana in 2005. Of her participation in the lineup, he says, “Oh my God. I should have done this when we first met. You know, a few years later, our original drummer was committed to another gig, and a voice inside my head said, ‘You should get Cindy. So we researched her on Google and played her on iTunes, and I went, ‘She’s not going to have any problem playing in this band. It’s a piece of cake for her.”
“From that, we’ve entered into this whole new incredible dimension of being in love with one another, and got married, and we’re going to make up for lost time because I should have had her in the band from the start.”
A drive with Carlos and Cindy can be a loud ride: Santana?
“I’ll just take this moment to brag, unapologetically: I get into the car with Cindy, and we’ll play Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, and the first thing she says is, ‘Turn it up! Louder!’ I’ll turn it up, and she’ll start singing, looking at the ceiling, all of Miles’ parts, or Herbie’s parts. I don’t know how many wives, spouses, can do that. She’s like, ‘Louder!’ Oh my God, I have won the lottery forever.”
What happens when the leader of Santana needs to impart artistic direction?
“That hasn’t happened,” Santana says. “We are the same. We love the same echelon of artists. … We love everything together. We pray together, and for each other, and it’s working. I am very giddy about Cindy being in the band.”
The change in vocalists was to keep Team Santana fresh:
“I relate a lot to a basketball team, whether it’s the Warriors or the Spurs, you know, if you want to get to the championship, the pinnacle, you constantly shift energy,” Santana says. “To me, when it’s all said and done, it’s all about energy. I don’t work too well with “polite-itis,” or ho-hum, kinda-sorta.
“I don’t work with that at all. I dismiss it. I need bright eyes, claws, teeth salivating to hit that next note. Tear it apart, but in a beautiful way. I don’t want to be gummed to death. To do that, you constantly need to shift musicians to gain that type of energy. That’s why we made the changes.”
The new voice is from another place:
“Ray Greene has a voice that I say is from the other side of the tracks,” Santana says. “It’s where bad people are even afraid to go sometimes, you know what I mean? There is a different tonality. Otis Redding, that side. It’s not suburbia. It’s a different kind of voice. It’s like ghetto from heaven.”
Santana is universal:
“Our portfolio and our Rolodex is really vast,” Santana reminds. “To go from Marvin Gaye to everything in Africa, Latin, to rock, we move around a lot. We’re not a one-trick pony. We play for all colors and all people. Santana is life.”
Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWiththeDish.
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