Carlos Augusto Alves Santana

Carlos Augusto Alves Santana was born on June 20, 1947. Grammy Award-winning musician, alias Santana. He became popular in the late 1960s and late 1970s with the band Santana, who played a mixture of rock, salsa and jazz (he is considered a pioneer of this fusion genre). Carlos Santana’s career spans several decades with bands, solos and collaborations. In 1999, he released the duet CD Supernatural, with which he entered the mainstream and became popular among the younger generation. The following albums had almost the same success. In 2010, his CD Guitar Heaven: Santana Performs the Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time was released, featuring covers of famous rock songs.
Santana was born on July 20, 1947 in Otlan de Navarro, Jalisco, Mexico. Having learned to play the violin at the age of five and the guitar at the age of eight under the tutelage of his father, who was a mariachi musician, his younger brother Jorge also became a professional guitarist. Santana was heavily influenced by Richie Valens at a time when there were very few Mexicans in American rock music. The family moved from Outlan to Tijuana, across the US border. They then moved to San Francisco, where her father had a full-time job. In October 1966, Santana founded the Santana Blues Band. By 1968, the band had begun to incorporate various influences into electric blues. Santana later said, “If I’d go to the cat room, he’d be listening to Sly [Stone] and Jimi Hendrix; Another guy would listen to the Stones and the Beatles. The other boy was listening to Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaria. The other guy was listening to Miles [Davis] and [John] Coltrane, for me it was like being in college.”

Around the age of eight, Santana “came under the influence of blues artists such as B.B. King, Javier Batiz, Mike Bloomfield and John Lee Hooker. The mid-1960s jazz guitar of Gabor Szabo also greatly influenced Santana’s playing. Indeed, Szabo’s ‘Gypsy Queen’ was used as the second part of Santana’s 1970 arrangement of Peter Green’s “Black Magic Woman”, with nearly identical guitar parts. Santana’s 2012 instrumental album Shape Shifter includes a song titled “Mr. Szabo,” which is dedicated to Szabo. Santana also cites Hendrix, Bloomfield, and Peter Green as major influences; he considered Bloomfield a direct mentor, writing in his foreword about a pivotal meeting with Bloomfield in San Francisco, which he wrote in his 2000 biography of Bloomfield, Michael Bloomfield: If You Love Blues – Oral History Ages 10 to 12. He was sexually abused by Santana, lived in the Mission area, graduated from James Lick High School, and dropped out of Mission High School in 1965. He was accepted to California State University, Northridge, and Humboldt State University, but chose not to attend college.