Product 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".

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: #24584 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

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,