Mexican Shaman

Corazón is Carlos Santana's first album for a major label since 2002's Shaman. It marks his reunion with executive producer Clive Davis, who masterminded 1999's multi-platinum Supernatural. Billed by RCA as his "first Latin album," Corazón is the studio counterpart to the guitarist's HBO Latino concert special that featured his band performing with a host of Latin music superstars in his native Mexico. The singing was (as it is here) mostly in Spanish. For the most part, Santana actually sounds hungry again. His studio band is filled with killers, including drummer Dennis Chambers, timbalero Karl Perazza, and conguero Raul Rekow. Opener "Saideira" features his trademark tone in a passionate, stinging, gritty exchange with vocalist Samuel Rosa, from the Brazilian rock and reggae band Skank. Jittering, insistent horns and layers of percussion push both men to escalate the battle. Juanes lends his soulful croon to first single "La Flaca." It's got an anthemic hook with layers of backing vocals framing Santana's tight and tasty solos.

This set forms exactly the period in which Santana was most influenced by jazzrock, starting whith the supreme coherent Caravanserai,then joining John McLaughlin on Love Devotion Surrender, followed by Welcome, in fact the best of the set, although less coherent in the sense of being an album: the tracks are very different in style, but are all very good!…

This second volume in Sony's EU Original Album Classics series looks at five albums over a ten-year period. The first four of these – Inner Secrets, Marathon, Zebop, and Shango – catch the band during a renaissance of singles and a decline in album sales in the marketplace…

Three disparate travelers, a disillusioned preacher, an unsuccessful prospector, and a larcenous, cynical con man, meet at a decrepit railroad station in the 1870s Southwest. The prospector and the preacher were witnesses at the singularly memorable rape and murder trial of the notorious Mexican outlaw Carasco. The bandit duped an aristocratic Southerner into believing he knew the location of a lost Aztec treasure. The greedy "gentleman" allows himself to be tied up while Carasco deflowers his wife.