For those of us who think Carlos Santana is the personification of the spiritual style of the guitar, the peak of his art began with Caravanseri (Columbia 1972).
Carlos had taken an interest in John Coltrane and the way that Coltrane had embodied his spirituality into his music. Having successfully merged rock and latin music in his previous albums, Carlos also developed an interest in Miles Davis'
Bitches Brew and the fusion of rock with jazz.What made Carlos' swing toward jazz legitimate is that he didn't try to emulate Coltrane or Miles _per se_, but rather fused his latin rock with spiritual jazz, to form his own style. While the Santana band reformed around this time to reflect the leader's interests and direction, Carlos took to alternately releasing more rock oriented "Santana" albums with jazz oriented "Carlos Santana" albums.The latter must be viewed with his collaborations with John McLauglin and his collaboration with John Coltrane's widow, Alice[1]. While many know of the
Illuminations collaboration
fewer know that Alice Coltrane was given producer credits for Santana's 1973 _Lotus_, a three album set released in Japan, which consists of live Japanese performances from 1972. In my opinion _Lotus_ captures the live performance of that post-Caravanseri style like nothing else available. The pace of this thing is almost wearying. If you like this music, you will have favorites (I like this version of "Samba Pa Ti"), but eventually you will come to appreciate that there is no filler on this album - nothing is sub-par.I bring all of this up because I really like Santana's cover of Alice's arrangement of "Going Home".fn1. A really nice remaster of the the studio output of these collaborations was produced by Bill Laswell,
Divine Light: Reconstructions & Mix Translation.
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