Santana

By the release of Amigos, the Santana band's seventh album, only Carlos Santana and David Brown remained from the band that conquered Woodstock, and only Carlos had been in the band continuously since. Meanwhile, the group had made some effort to arrest its commercial slide, hiring an outside producer, David Rubinson, and taking a tighter, more up-tempo, and more vocal approach to its music. The overt jazz influences were replaced by strains of R&B/funk and Mexican folk music. The result was an album more dynamic than any since Santana III in 1971. "Let It Shine" (number 77), an R&B-tinged tune, became the group's first chart single in four years, and the album returned Santana to Top Ten status.

Santana is the primary exponent of Latin-tinged rock, particularly due to its combination of Latin percussion (congas, timbales, etc.) with bandleader Carlos Santana's distinctive, high-pitched lead guitar playing. The group was the last major act to emerge from the psychedelic San Francisco music scene of the 1960s and it enjoyed massive success at the end of the decade and into the early '70s. The musical direction then changed to a more contemplative and jazzy style as the band's early personnel gradually departed, leaving the name in the hands of Carlos Santana, who guided the group to consistent commercial success over the next quarter-century.

Given the sheer size of his catalog and the preponderance of Santana best-of compilations out there, trying to pick a single-disc collection can be a quest. This one, issued by Sony, assembles 17 cuts from the band's long run with Columbia, and does a very decent, if not perfect, job of capturing the essence of the band by collecting little more than just the hit singles. In accomplishing that, it does leave out some seminal cuts – there isn't even an edited version of "Soul Sacrifice here, nor are "Samba Pa Ti" from Abraxas and "Song of the Wind" from Caravanserai present. That said, virtually everything here is very solid.