Santana

First revealed in the late 1960s, Mexican guitarist Carlos Santana, known simply as Santana, established from the outset a blend of psychedelic rock, blues, jazz and Afro‑Latin music, driven by prominent percussion and extended instrumental passages. The band’s breakthrough at the Woodstock festival in 1969 coincided with the release of the album Santana that same year, followed by Abraxas (1970) and Santana III (1971), which cemented this Latin‑rock formula combining organ, electric guitars and rhythms inspired by salsa and mambo. Throughout the 1970s Santana at times steered his music toward jazz‑rock and fusion, notably with Caravanserai (1972), while regularly renewing the lineup around Carlos Santana, the project’s only constant member. The 1980s saw the group incorporate more pop and FM‑rock elements, for example on Zebop! (1981). In 1999 Santana regained strong international visibility with Supernatural, an album of vocal collaborations drawn from North American pop and R&B, continuing in that vein with Shaman (2002) and All That I Am (2005). The band later returned to more directly rock‑oriented and Latin sounds with Corazón (2014), Santana IV (2016) and Africa Speaks (2019), maintaining the continuity of a hybrid identity in which improvisation, Latin American influences and song formats coexist.