Track Listing

1. Batuka
2. No One To Depend On
3. Taboo
4. Toussaint L'Overture
5. Everybody's Everything
6. Guajira
7. Jungle Strut
8. Everything's Coming Our Way
9. Para Los Rumberos
10. Batuka (2)
11. Jungle Strut (2)
12. Gumbo

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12378 in Music
• Released on: 1998-04-06
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
1971's Santana 3 is Santana's equivalent of the Beatles' sprawling and diverse White Album. As with that album, friction within the band caused a precipitous decrease in collaborative songwriting and a massive increase in wasted studio time during its recording. Also similarly, the final product lacks the cohesiveness of their previous efforts, but each song is a jewel. Its instrumental tracks--"Baktuka", "Jungle Strut" and "Toussaint L'Overture", which became a staple of all the band's subsequent live shows--helped to shift the record-buying public's interest from the primarily riff-based rock & roll of the late 60s to the jazz/rock fusion of the early 70s. Carlos Santana still regularly performs two of the other tracks: the slinky samba "Guajira" and "No One To Depend On"; the latter he repudiated when he finally turned his back on the fame and drugs which fractured his band during the recording of Santana 3 and came to embrace religion. Perhaps most importantly, the entire album is saturated by the best Latin rhythm section in popular music, as well as Carlos Santana's own uniquely intense guitar sound. --James Swift

CD Description
All it takes is a listen to the opening track and you know this band means serious business. From the very first measures of "Batuka", SANTANA III rocks on the eardrums like a tonof bricks. While the band's first album and ABRAXAS were widely celebrated at the time of their release, this masterly work steamrollered to #1 on Billboard for five consecutive weeks in 1971. By this point, the band was clearly more seasoned at arranging and making the studio experience work for them--the music is at once scorching, heavy, experimental, and disciplined.
Indeed, the Santana band had already come a long way on its Latin rock-blues-R&B-funk journey, and yetthis would be the final recording with the original Woodstock-era lineup, with guitar genius Carlos Santana and organist/singer Gregg Rolie at the core of the action. Every track is a "deep cut". "Batuka" and "Toussaint L'Overture" featurethe kind of classic, wailing Santana guitar riffs that always inspire a few notches worth of volume increase on the stereo. The band's pulsating Afro-Latin rhythm section is in full force on these tunes as well, and makes real mincemeat ofthe uplifting favourite, "Everybody's Everything".

Customer Reviews

no TABOO with this album
I see this gets mixed reviews and I agree that it does seem to incorporate a number of Santana's styles. However, this was the first Santana album I bought, perhaps two years after its release, solely on the strength of hearing (amongst others) Taboo played in a Co-op record store. So, I'll just say this:

It is grand testimony that although it is well over 30 years since I bought it, I still listen regularly to some of the tracks...particularly Taboo and, on the right day, the track can move me as if I've never heard it before. The end of the track contains simply one of the most passionate angst-ridden guitar solos that I have ever heard in my looong love affair with the guitar. Trust me, if you want emotional soloing, this track alone must be heard before you die.

Better than it looks
This album is a litle curious, being a mixture of several of Santana's preceding and later styles, and never quite gelling as a single, coherent album. If you listen to it in one session, it is almost certain both to delight and annoy you. The single from it "Everybody's Everything" was acclaimed on the album cover as being a smash hit for them, but that somehow managed to escape me at the time, despite that I was then working as a DJ. Maybe it was a smash hit in the Upper Volta. It's probably the worst track on the album, too.

It is too easy to dismiss the album as just 'fan fodder' because it contains two of the best dance music tracks you'll find anywhere in the wide world of music, namely "Jungle Strut" and "Para Los Rumberos", these also being magnificent examples from their original keyboard player who departed the group not long after. These sandwich the pretty dreadful "EveryThing's Coming Our Way".

The final three tracks are CD add-ins (not on the vinyl version) from a 1973 concert at Fillimore West. They're OK, but if you want to hear Santana in concert and be stunned by their prowess, you really need to get hold of their wonderful album "Moonflower" which mixes live and studio work with incredible ease.

So, Santana's Third Album... try to find a way to block out the few tracks that will really annoy you as this album contains some really great material elsewhere,

Their classic
Yes, yes, yes ~ their absolute knock out classic and the culmination of all they'd been and become throughout the Woodstock era and their preceding first and second albums. Here, the basic six piece band was augmented by the merely teenaged but, even then, amazingly accomplished Neal Schon on guitar, with guests Coke Escovedo on (yet more) percussion and the Tower of Power horns on a few tracks (very probably including what would then have been a very young Greg Adams). With this combination of pedigree and personnel, the whole show really came together like never before or since.

The Third absolutely brims with power and inspiration from end to end ~ the terrific twin lead guitars of Santana and Schon complimented so ably by Gregg Rolie's great organ work, the explosive three percussionists + full drum section, the fiery ToP horns ~ whew! Recorded again in San Francisco, though this time at CBS studios.

As with so many true classics (e.g. Focus 3, Dark Side of the Moon, The Smoker you Drink, etc), this one was a group effort on all fronts, the magnificent whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Though Carlos Santana was the undoubted leader of the band (jointly with Gregg Rolie on the organ) and a great guitarist, his compositional contributions are such that this definitely wouldn't have been anything like as great were it not for the gelling of the band, both as a whole and as individuals, all of whom contributed in more or less equal measure on all fronts.

After Santana's crummy fourth album Caravanserai, most of which was about as invigorating as a stale doughnut, both Schon and Rolie left, Rolie spending a year out of the music business altogether. But then they got together to form Journey, itself a hugely successful outfit.

The Third Album (actually untitled) was the real Santana, the Woodstock Santana, the band Santana, and never again would these heights be scaled by any of the bands subsequently put together under the Santana aegis.

The 24 bit digitally remastered edition (which, as it happens, isn't that much better than the original CD reissue which was already PDG) comes with some interesting sleeve notes, an indication of who's who in the group photo (I always did wonder) plus three live tracks from the same era. Two of these are from the third album and are interesting to hear live for the first time after all these years though, compared with the studio versions, they're also weak and untidy affairs. That aside, it's odd to hear Batuka performed as a standalone track ~ to me it always seemed to be a perfect overture for the rest of the album to follow or, at the very least, an introductory passage to No One to Depend On. Yet, apparently, No One To Depend On was recorded separately, two days before Batuka ~ how strange. You'd never know it from the way the two tracks on the studio album meld seamlessly together.

Santana's Third Album is both peerless and timeless. And totally brilliant. Everything since pales by comparison.