Latest news with #Sentient
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Carlos Santana postpones 2nd show after medical incident
Legendary guitarist Carlos Santana has called off a second show following a medical incident on Tuesday. The Santana frontman postponed his show scheduled for Wednesday night at the Smart Financial Center in Sugar Land, Texas, according to a representative. Carlos Santana collapses during Michigan concert due to heat exhaustion, dehydration On Tuesday, Santana was set to play a concert in San Antonio, Texas, when he suffered a dehydration event, according to the rep. "It is with profound disappointment that I have to inform you all that tonight's show in San Antonio has been postponed," the representative said in a statement that day. "Mr. Santana was at the venue (Majestic Theatre) preparing for tonight's show when he experienced an event that was determined to be dehydration. Out of an abundance of caution and the health of Mr. Santana, the decision to postpone the show was the most prudent course of action." The representative added that Santana was "doing well and is looking forward to coming back to San Antonio soon as well as continuing his US Tour." The statement concluded, "Thank you all very much for your understanding. The show will be rescheduled soon." The rep also advised those who were planning to attend the event to hold on to their tickets, as directions on the rescheduled show would come as soon as possible. In 2022, Santana collapsed onstage during a concert at Pine Knob Music Theatre, an outdoor amphitheater in Clarkston, located about 40 miles northwest of Detroit, Michigan. Mariah Carey cancels 2 more Christmas concerts as flu derails holiday tour The rock legend was performing when he was "over-taken with heat exhaustion and dehydration," his manager, Michael Vrionis, said in a statement obtained by ABC News at the time. Santana is currently on his Oneness Tour 2025. In the coming weeks, he is slated to perform in cities including Nashville, New Orleans and Las Vegas, before heading to Europe for the summer. Last month, Santana released his new album, "Sentient." Carlos Santana postpones 2nd show after medical incident originally appeared on
Forbes
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Santana's New Album Is A Surprise Hit On Charts Few Fans Would Expect
Santana's The Sentient debuts on Billboard's jazz charts, scoring the band new top 10 placements and ... More proving the group still knows how to surprise fans. KANSAS CITY, MO - AUGUST 14: Musician Carlos Santana performs at Sprint Center on August 14, 2014 in Kansas City, Missouri. (Photo by Jason Squires/WireImage) For decades now, Carlos Santana has helped shape the sound of rock and Latin music with an unceasing stream of innovative albums and truly unforgettable guitar riffs. The Grammy winner's namesake group, Santana, has appeared on countless Billboard charts over the years, with several of its most popular releases reaching impressive heights. Even with such an accomplished discography, the band is still finding new ways to surprise and succeed. This week, Santana's latest release, Sentient, debuts on several of Billboard's rankings. The compilation, which features largely material already familiar to longtime listeners, is a minor hit with fans, and it even manages to bring the group back to a tally that few would expect the rockers to have reached at any point. Part of what makes Sentient's quick success unique is how Billboard has chosen to classify it. Rather than slotting it into a rock, Latin, or even the world category — all of which would be appropriate given the band's long history — the chart company instead labeled it as a jazz release. That designation brings it to tallies that Santana isn't as familiar with. On the Contemporary Jazz Albums chart, Sentient starts at No. 2. The set almost gives Santana its first leader on that specific tally – almost. Over on the broader Jazz Albums list, which encompasses all kinds of jazz releases, the compilation opens at No. 6, giving the band another top 10 — and a brand new career high point. Sentient earns Santana the band's second appearance and second top 10 on the Contemporary Jazz Albums chart. The only other time the band reached that list was more than a decade ago, with a live album recorded in 2011 at Montreux. That special release peaked at No. 4. The newly-released Sentient also represents a milestone for the group on the Jazz Albums chart. While Santana has placed on the ranking a few times before, this is the collective's first appearance inside the top 10. The musicians hit a new peak as the band's total number of appearances on the all-encompassing jazz list advances to three. While it's clearly a success in the jazz space, Sentient also performs well enough to reach a more competitive and wide-reaching Billboard ranking. This week, the new release lands at No. 31 on the Top Album Sales chart, which tracks the bestselling titles in the U.S. each frame based solely on purchases. The project opens with 3,000 copies purchased, according to Luminate. The purchase-only list is familiar territory for Santana. With Sentient now included in the group's discography, 18 of the outfit's releases have found space on the Top Album Sales chart.
Forbes
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Santana's New Album Quietly Debuts — Despite A Michael Jackson Collaboration
Santana's new compilation Sentient debuts on two charts in the U.K., marking the band's first ... More appearance in years. ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS - JULY 12: Carlos Santana performs at day one of the North Sea Jazz Festival at Ahoy on July 12, 2013 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. (Photo by Greetsia Tent/WireImage) Santana has spent decades working tirelessly. Unlike so many other bands that made it bid decades ago, the group continues to produce new music – and in between traditional studio albums, the outfit churns out special releases, live sets, and compilations that appeal largely to its dedicated following. The group, led by guitarist and bandleader Carlos Santana – who lends his name to the band, though the focus has always been on him – has enjoyed multiple eras of massive commercial success. From the psychedelic late '60s to a late-'90s resurgence that featured Grammy wins and chart-topping singles, Santana just keeps going. This week, the band scores another chart win in the United Kingdom, proving that there's still interest in anything connected to the brand. The group's new album Sentient opens on a pair of U.K. rankings, and in nearly identical positions. The collaborative compilation launches at No. 57 on the Official Physical Albums chart. Just one space below that, it begins its run at No. 58 on the Official Albums Sales tally. Both rankings are focused on purchases, though one includes digital downloads while the other sticks exclusively to physical formats. Sentient marks only the fourth time Santana has placed a title on the Official Albums Sales chart, which is somewhat surprising given the band's reputation and massive commercial success throughout the years. The group has fared far better on the Official Physical Albums chart. As Sentient arrives, Santana has now earned 13 entries on that roster. The band hasn't released a project in quite some time, so these new wins mark Santana's first appearance on either of these U.K. charts in nearly four years. The last time the outfit launched something new was back in the fall of 2021, when Blessings and Miracles debuted. That effort performed slightly better than Sentient, managing to break into the top 40 on both sales-focused tallies. The new album was quietly announced back in February on Santana's official website. According to the group, Sentient is described as a retrospective featuring 11 'passion-filled, mesmerizing' cuts. It's a star-studded collaborative release that features lesser-known cuts, high-profile duets, and slightly-altered takes on tunes some fans will already know. Among the collaborators are legendary names like Miles Davis, Smokey Robinson, and Daryl McDaniels (from Run-D.M.C.), as well as the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson. That latter cut is a track from Jackson's Invincible album, on which Santana played guitar. The lead single was a reworked version of 'Please Don't Take Your Love Away,' alongside Robinson.
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Carlos Santana interview
Mar. 30—Carlos Santana, the multi-Grammy Award winning guitarist and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, is coming to Albuquerque's Isleta Amphitheater on April 19, as part of his global "Oneness" tour. His new album, "Sentient," was released on March 28. Santana sat down with the Albuquerque Journal for a wide-ranging discussion on spirituality, politics and his six-decade career in music. Hi, Mr. Santana. How are you? Pretty good. Yourself? I'm doing well. So, you're coming to Albuquerque in April. We're very excited, and I just wanted to ask you, given the historic and cultural ties between Mexico and New Mexico, do you feel at home when you come here? Yeah, I feel at home. Totally at home. Absolutely. It's been a little while since you've been here. I think you were gonna come last year, but you had to have a procedure on your back. Yes, I have sciatica, and I had an operation. But that's corrected now, and I'm fine. OK, great. And I heard you also broke your finger last month? Yeah, I'm fine with that one, too. Tell us about your new album, "Sentient." "Sentient" is a name for a being, a person, who — I describe it like a Christmas tree, and all the ornaments around the Christmas tree are the attributes, the elements, the ingredients, the nutrients — of compassion, kindness, patience, consideration and humility. There's a lot of beautiful things that a sentient being owns and has. We all have that, but very few people share it. A lot of people become angry and mean. But a sentient being is more consistent with emanating light than darkness or fear or ignorance. I know you're you're a deeply spiritual man. You've been influenced by Don Miguel Ruiz, and you also studied with Hindu gurus and Indigenous teachers. How has spirituality informed your life and your music? It brought light into the subject. It brought light and wisdom and a sense of clarity that I really needed in my life. We all need clarity every day, because there's so much darkness and ignorance outside that we need to remember to take a deep breath, go inside, and gain clarity. A lot of people who were playing music since the '60s, since I started, they didn't do so well with time, you know. It's almost like they OD'd on themselves. Some of them OD'd literally. That's what I'm saying. But I was spared, because I purposely pursued spiritual discipline. Who's been your most important spiritual teacher? Probably my mother. She was a healer, right? She practiced Indigenous Mexican healing medicine? Her attitude towards life and people was very, very commendable, very practical and down-to-earth. But my mother had supreme conviction. She had this knowing conviction, and I was constantly in awe of her. She instilled conviction and my father, charisma. Do you feel like they're still part of you? Can you feel them sort of watching over you? Oh yes, always. They will always be in my next breath and in every drop of blood. They're there. That's beautiful. Let me ask you, when I think about your place in music history, you've obviously done a lot. But I feel like you kind of took B.B. King's electric blues guitar, and both you and Jimi Hendrix took that into the stratosphere, into a psychedelic dimension. Is that a fair assessment? We learned from B.B., and I also combined B.B. with African music and Tito Puente and Puerto Rican and Cuban music and all the African music. Out of all the musicians in Africa, I probably know 99.9%. I know that music. So, when I combined it with my music, I became more than a Mexican guy playing piñata music, you know? Yeah, I can hear the influence of Fela Kuti, I think. Oh yeah, I love Fela Kuti. Like, you can really go into a trance, and then go into different places in your mind. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. I feel a oneness with them, which I can articulate in the music. Let me ask you about about the new album. Some of these songs are ones you've recorded over the years that haven't been released yet. There's collaborations with Miles Davis and Run DMC, and a Michael Jackson song. Tell us about some of those influential artists who are part of this. By grace, I'm able to be a center stage with Run DMC, Michael Jackson — two songs from Michael Jackson, "Stranger in Moscow" and one that he actually sings on it. And one with Smokey Robinson. Three or four with Miles Davis. Not that many artists can have that that kind of company around themselves, you know? Right, it's incredible that you've worked with all these amazing people, and you continue to stay relevant and try new things. Different generations know you from different work that you've done. Having that kind of longevity in the music industry is also pretty rare. Thank you. You know, I function by grace. I have a T-shirt that says "Grace is my GPS." So, to me, grace is very real, like my next breath. It's not luck or chance or fortune. Grace is solid like gravity. If you drop something 100 times, it will fall 100 times, because that's the law of gravity. There is a law of grace. And with the law of grace, anything and everything is possible. How do we put ourselves in line to receive that grace? Learn to meditate, open your mind, open your heart, and be nice. Be kind. Modify your mindset. Speaking of meditation, one of my favorite albums you did was "Illuminations" with Alice Coltrane, which I think is sometimes a bit overlooked. Oh, thank you. You were both exploring Hinduism at that time and combining Indian music and jazz, and it's a beautiful melding of different traditions. Yeah, I think they call it New Age now, but we were into everything from galactic music by Sun Ra to — everything. We loved exploring. Sometimes when people think of New Age music, they think of elevator music that they play at the spa, but this is very deep and very real. What was it like working with Alice Coltrane? It was the supreme blessing. She was very, very enlightening to me. She taught me a lot, and I learned a lot. You know, elevator music doesn't have to have the stigma of music without balls, you know? Or music without any courage, or without any energy. What makes it like that is the people who select that music. Like, for example, I know a lot of music from (jazz guitarist) Wes Montgomery could be called elevator music, but it it sounds like you're inside of a Rolls-Royce, hearing The Beatles, you know? So, what makes something bland and gutless, or like I said, without balls, is that some musicians don't know how to play with the fire of passion. They play without energy, without fire. That's what gives it a bad name, so people call it elevator music. But elevator music doesn't have to be that. If I was in charge of who programs the elevator music in the shopping malls and the parking lots, people would be rocking! I wish you were in charge of that! That would be nice. Well, I have to ask you, because President (Donald) Trump has been reelected, and I know you've been something of an activist, standing up for immigrants — especially fellow Mexican immigrants — what new era are we entering? We're entering an era where we're learning — like a dog shakes off water — we're learning to ward off ignorance, fear, prejudice and stupidity. Have you ever seen a shaggy dog shake off water when the sun is behind it? It creates a rainbow. So, to me, a rainbow is gonna come out of all of this. Because the United States, first of all, is a social experiment, and we're learning to be each other's brother's keeper. Like Robin Williams said, the people of the world can borrow our Constitution, cause we're not using it! But if we learn to really utilize the Constitution, and the Bible, there will be compassion and kindness and oneness and brotherhood and unity. A lot of corrupt corporations have taken over everything, so what you have is energy that is very, very flawed. But I still believe in the core American principles. I think that we can be a united force, and we can help the world with the problem of starvation. We could bring peace on earth. But we have to learn how to meditate. We have to learn how to feel the light that we are. That's the remedy for just about everything on the planet, to individually learn to meditate and be one with your own light, your own divinity. That's very hopeful. I love the image of a dog, shaking off water and creating a rainbow. And it's good to have hope, because I think hopelessness can destroy people. Light will always win over darkness. Eventually, you and I, we're gonna see that on a TV commercial — a dog shaking off water and creating a rainbow. The water is just the flaws and imperfections and limitations. We're gonna be all right. We're on our way. We will all graduate together into a place where we can celebrate our own light and our own divinity. Tell us about your upcoming tour. I'm gonna do a global Woodstock tour, right now through the next year. Three days of unity, harmony and oneness. Bands from all over the world will bring all these songs that compliment life. No "slap the bitch," none of that stuff. They'll bring compassion and kindness. "Blowing in the Wind," "Imagine," "One Love," "All You Need Is Love." Different kinds of songs like that. We can design songs that can help the individual feel more empowered within their own light, and that's what I want to do. I want to create a global Woodstock, starting at San Francisco's Golden Gate, all the way to Central Park, around to Hyde Park, and keep going and end up in Honolulu. We call it "Oneness." Who else is gonna be part of it? Well, I invited a lot of bands who want to do it. Earth Wind & Fire wants to do it, Eric Clapton wants to do it, Metallica wants to do it. A lot of people wanna do it. It's just a matter of sitting down with their managers and the agents and putting a blueprint on the table. Does Metallica have the "peace and love" energy? Absolutely! I love Metallica. Kirk Hammett is a good friend of mine. I think sometimes we put these different groups into different categories. The music industry is always pigeonholing people. It's not just the music industry. I mean, it's also individual people who are too much in their mind. When you are in your mind, there is separation and division. When you are in your heart, it's only one. And it's beautiful. Well, thank you for those words of wisdom. And thank you for being Carlos Santana! Thank you so much. Bless your family. Take care. This interview was recorded on Feb. 18. It has been edited for clarity.
The Independent
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Carlos Santana: ‘Hostile forces tried to destroy Michael Jackson'
By his own admission, Carlos Santana has led a charmed life. In 1999, he walked into the studio to record 'Smooth' only to find that a team of two dozen people had already figured out the bridge, the chorus and the verses. The song became an international smash hit, winning multiple Grammys and catapulting the virtuoso guitarist back to the top of the pop charts three decades into his career. 'All I had to do was just close my eyes and play my guitar,' recalls the 77-year-old contentedly. 'I'm happy to say that it's been like that with my life since I can remember. I just show up, the great spirit orchestrates the scenario, and all of a sudden Carlos Santana looks and sounds really, really good!' Today he's at home at his $20m, 8,000 sq ft retreat overlooking Hanalei Bay on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. I can't attest to how he's looking, but the great spirit certainly has Santana sounding pretty well. When I ask over the phone how he's doing, he purrs: 'I'm grateful, how are you?' Well, you would be, wouldn't you? 'Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,' he tells me when I ask, redundantly, what attracted him to life in Hawaii. 'When you're in Kauai, you're in heaven and you're more alive than ever.' Santana is fond of these sorts of metaphysical allusions. He speaks much like he plays guitar, never more than a few moments away from drifting off to some distant cosmic plane. His habit of talking in abstract platitudes is entertaining if occasionally frustrating. Attempting to pin him down to a firm answer can feel like trying to drive a nail through a sunbeam. Yet while Santana may project the easy, insouciant air of a hippie mystic, not everything in his world is always breezy. Earlier this year, he took a 'hard fall' while ambling around on the island and broke a finger on his left hand, forcing him to postpone a string of dates for an upcoming residency in Las Vegas. It's the sort of injury a guitar player might lose sleep over, but he's unruffled. 'Thank you for asking, my finger is recuperating really well,' he says when I bring it up. 'I lost my equilibrium and fell. I put my hand out to block the shock and broke my baby finger, but they operated and put it back in place. One or two more weeks and I'll be good as new.' Clearly, it will take more than putting his little finger out of joint to trouble Santana, widely regarded as one of the greatest to ever pick up a guitar; in 2023, Rolling Stone named him the 11th greatest guitarist of all time. He's expecting to resume shows in the US in April, ahead of a summer European tour that arrives in the UK in June. He also has a new album, Sentient, that showcases various collaborations he's recorded over the decades featuring icons including Miles Davis, Smokey Robinson and Michael Jackson. Several of the songs have been released before on other people's records, but Santana wanted to have them all in one place. 'When I go to the beautiful hotels in Europe, in the lobby there's always an incredible arrangement of flowers,' he explains, never one to miss the opportunity for an elaborate metaphor. 'They hire someone just to arrange the colours and the flowers and the textures. That's how I approached my album. I wanted to create the right amount of colours, moods and purpose.' One track he's never put out before is his bewitching instrumental cover of Jackson's ballad 'Stranger in Moscow', recorded live in 2007. That flows straight into 'Whatever Happens', his collaboration with the late King of Pop from Jackson's 2001 album Invincible. The juxtaposition of the two songs means that when Jackson's voice finally arrives, it sounds like an act of resurrection. Santana is a staunch defender of Jackson. In his 2014 memoir, he opened up about the harrowing childhood sexual abuse he himself had suffered between the ages of 10 and 12 at the hands of an American tourist who showered him with gifts. He says he doesn't believe Jackson was guilty of the similar crimes he's been accused of. 'The hostile forces on this planet have an agenda, and that's to destroy your light,' he says. ' Michael Jackson did a lot of great things with his money for children, and the hostile forces didn't like it.' What exactly are these shadowy forces? 'The hostile forces are Satan, Lucifer and the Devil,' Santana explains, matter-of-factly. 'Santana is a threat, and Michael Jackson is a threat to darkness, because we bring so much light that other people believe they're also worthy to share their own light. That's really what it's about.' If this all sounds a little out there, Santana assures me it's serious business. 'This is not wishful thinking, goody-two-shoes energy,' he says. 'This is what Miles Davis calls 'motherf***er energy.'' Santana's two posthumous collaborations with the trumpet maestro, the Latin groove 'Get On' and the soulful 'Rastafario', provide some of the best moments on the new record. Santana added his guitar parts in 1996, several years after Davis, who died in 1991, had recorded his with the Italian jazz-rock composer Paolo Rustichelli. Once again there's a sense of communing with the dead, the pair's signature instruments speaking to each other across the great divide. Santana and Davis were close for decades, first meeting when the guitarist invited the jazz musician to support his band at Tanglewood in 1970. They stayed in touch, Davis often calling Santana late in the night to discuss music and life in general. 'I felt like a student all the time,' Santana remembers. 'I'm grateful that he trusted me.' Despite their friendship, they never recorded together. Their respective sessions with Rustichelli may be the closest they ever came to sharing a studio, but Santana isn't about to let a little thing like Davis being dead for several years put a damper on their collaboration. 'I think he's at that level of Stravinsky, Da Vinci, Pablo Picasso,' says Santana. 'The real geniuses have a way of stopping time so that in one instant you can feel infinity. When you hang around Miles you don't need a Rolex watch, because the time is always now. The straight people used to say: 'Life is short.' The hippies said: 'But wide.' It was like that with Miles.' Santana was part of the first wave of hippies to emerge from San Francisco in the mid-Sixties, but before that, he was a small boy growing up in the southwestern Mexican city of Autlán de Navarro in awe of his violinist father. José Santana could play elegant Latin music, such as the work of composers like Carlos Jobim and Agustín Lara, whom Santana compares to Cole Porter, but he mainly played in mariachi bands in order to feed his seven children. 'He had to play mariachi music because that's what American tourists wanted to hear,' explains Santana dismissively. ''Ay-ay-ay.' Piñata music, you know?' In 1954, when Santana was seven, his family moved to Tijuana where his father could find more work. Santana picked up the violin too, and got his start playing underage in bars and strip joints. Life in the bustling border city exposed him to the music of the Caribbean, African rhythms and salsa, all of which wound its way into his playing and would later distinguish him from guitarists who only studied the blues. The most important lessons, though, came from his father. 'What I learned from him was the same thing that Clark Gable had: charisma,' he says. 'Women went bananas over him, especially when he played the violin and sang. My father had women eating out of his hand.' A few years later, Santana's family moved north again to San Francisco. Today, families crossing the border looking for work are being targeted by an immigration crackdown instigated by the Trump administration, of which Santana is no fan. 'There's only one family on this planet, but part of our family is invested emotionally in fear,' he says. Yet he counsels against lending politicians too much significance. 'It's an illusion. Donald Trump is just fog. There is fog in San Francisco, and fog in London, but let me remind people: fog always disappears by two o'clock in the afternoon because the sun burns it away. Don't let fog scare you, because the sun is always shining.' As bad as things might get, he believes there's always something to be learnt from any situation. 'To me, Donald Trump has come here to teach us a lesson,' he argues. 'What can Donald Trump do to change people to believe more in love than greed or fear or superiority? Hopefully, we learn something from Donald Trump about how to become better human beings.' When Santana arrived in San Francisco, he found himself at the heart of a revolutionary era. By forming the Santana Blues Band in 1966, he was staking his claim to be part of it. 'If you went to somebody's house in San Francisco, they were playing Ravi Shankar, The Doors, Creedence Clearwater, Sly Stone, the Grateful Dead,' he remembers. 'I said: 'Pretty soon they're going to be listening to Santana too!' Being in San Francisco was like an explosion of consciousness. Not just taking mescaline or ayahuasca or LSD. That was part of it, but something happened in San Francisco with the Black Panthers and Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix.' He credits Bill Graham, the legendary rock impresario and promoter who booked shows at the city's Fillmore venue, with broadening the musical scene. 'The Fillmore was my university,' he says, recalling performances of cosmic jazz by Sun Ra, the Latin percussion of Willie Bobo and the country songs of Buck Owens. 'Because of Bill Graham, we hippies learned to expand our vocabulary.' It was Graham who arranged for Santana to appear at Woodstock in 1969. The guitarist was given a dose of mescaline by Jerry Garcia shortly before taking the stage and hallucinated that his instrument had transformed into a sort of electric snake that he had to wrestle to tame, but that only added to the intensity of his performance. After his band's 11-minute instrumental 'Soul Sacrifice' was included in the festival's film and album, they shot to fame around the world. 'To me, Woodstock was like watching Jesus on the mountain giving out gluten-free bread and mercury-free fish,' jokes Santana. 'We shared everything.' A few months later, Santana was one of the opening acts at Altamont, the infamous free Rolling Stones concert in California that ended in tragedy when a fan was killed by Hell's Angels who'd been hired to provide security. Cultural historians have often cited it as the moment wide-eyed hippie optimism came crashing down to bloody reality, but Santana doesn't see it that way. 'The hippie movement will never die, as long as someone cares to share flowers, kindness, consideration or compassion,' he says. 'What happened in Altamont was a lack of professionalism. They should have hired security with a different kind of authority. That concert doesn't define the end of hippies. That idea came from the square people, who hated the hippies to begin with.' Clearly, though, he must have felt ready for some sort of spiritual change of speed. In 1972 Santana began following the Indian spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy, and spent a decade abiding by the guru's strict teachings. 'From '72 to '82, no drugs, no alcohol, very little minimal contact with females,' he recalls. 'It really worked out for me. It gave me a Marine or West Point military discipline. Discipline, devotion, dedication and diet got me to a place where I can show up on stage and feel like I can take the place higher.' He still lives by some of those teachings, even if he's relaxed a little on others. In 2020, he launched his own cannabis brand, Mirayo, and says it's good news that an ever-widening group of people are seeking to expand their consciousness through the use of psychedelic drugs. 'It's the first step towards self-awareness,' he says. 'A lot of people in America are going to South America to visit a shaman and drink ayahuasca tea and peyote, because they want a different paradigm, a different narrative.' Although Santana married his first wife, Deborah King, in 1973 it wasn't until after he'd moved away from the guru's restrictions in the mid-1980s that they had their three children, Salvador, Stella and Angelica. They divorced in 2007, and three years later Santana married his band's drummer, Cindy Blackman. The couple collaborate on a new album track, 'Coherence', which Santana describes with an echo of his father's seductive charisma. 'It was delightful,' he says. 'Anything I do with Cindy is delightful because she's in love with me, I'm in love with her, and we just make love, you know, on stage or in the studio.' Our time is nearly up, and I sense that for all his far-out zen wisdom, Santana is a little impatient to get back to his day. Kauai, and Cindy, are calling after all. Before we hang up, I ask how it feels to release a new album featuring so many collaborators who have already died. He tells me I'm looking at it all wrong. 'First of all, there is no end of life, because energy does not die,' he tells me. 'We go into another frequency. To me, death is an illusion. I'll give you an example.' I brace myself for one last metaphysical allegory, and Santana doesn't disappoint. 'When you're making love and you really get into the moment, the real moment, that incredible orgasm, there's no time in there,' he says. 'It's just infinity. I learned from the greatest musicians to enter into infinity when you're playing music. In that moment, that instant, you're able to become an immortal.' He reels off a list of musical immortals: Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, John Coltrane. But don't worry, he adds, the rest of us can get there as well. 'You have it too, and I have it,' he says. 'The only difference is that they used it. It's just like playing tennis. You've got to learn how to hit the ball in the sweet spot.' 'Sentient' is out 28 March. His UK tour begins on 18 June
