Santana (1969 album)
| Santana | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
.png) |
||||
| Studio album by Santana | ||||
| Released | August 1969 | |||
| Recorded | May 1969 | |||
| Studio | Pacific Recording, San Mateo | |||
| Genre | Latin rock, Psychedelic Rock | |||
| Length | 37:29 | |||
| Label | Columbia | |||
| Producer | Santana, Brent Dangerfield | |||
| Santana chronology | ||||
|
||||
| Singles from Santana | ||||
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Encyclopedia of Popular Music |  |
| Q | |
| Rolling Stone | |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
| The Village Voice | C− |
Santana is the debut studio album by Latin rock band Santana released in 1969. Over half of the album's length is composed of instrumental music, recorded by what was originally a purely free-form jam band. At the suggestion of manager Bill Graham, the band took to writing more conventional songs for more impact, but managed to retain the essence of improvisation in the music.
The album was destined to be a major release, given a headstart by the band's seminal performance at the earlier that August. Although "Jingo" was not very successful (only reaching #56), "Evil Ways", the second single taken from the album, was a U.S. Top 10 hit. The album peaked at #4 on the Billboard 200 pop album chart and #26 on the UK Albums Chart. It has been mixed and released in both stereo and quadraphonic.
In a contemporary review for Rolling Stone, Langdon Winner panned Santana as "a masterpiece of hollow techniques" and "a speed freak's delight - fast, pounding, frantic music with no real content". He compared the music's effect to methedrine, which "gives a high with no meaning", finding Rollie and Santana's playing repetitively unimaginative amidst a monotony of incompetent rhythms and inconsequential lyrics.Village Voice critic Robert Christgau shared Winner's sentiment in his "unreconstructed opposition to the methedrine school of American music. A lot of noise".
A retrospective Rolling Stone review was more enthusiastic, finding Santana "thrilling ... with ambition, soul and absolute conviction - every moment played straight from the heart". In 2003, the magazine ranked Santana number 150 on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.Colin Larkin deemed it an excellent example of Latin rock in his Encyclopedia of Popular Music (2011).
...
Wikipedia