Santana – Borboletta

Borboletta was the first new Santana band studio album in 11 months and the group's sixth overall. Once again, individual credits were listed for each song. The main problem was that the band seemed to be coasting; Carlos turned in the usual complement of high-pitched lead guitar work, and the percussionists pounded away, but the Santana sound had long since taken over from any individual composition, and the records were starting to sound alike. That, in turn, started to make them inessential; Borboletta spent less time on the charts than any previous Santana album.

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…

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…

Borboletta is the sixth studio album by Santana. It is one of his jazz-funk-fusion oriented albums, along with Caravanserai (1972), Welcome (1973), Love Devotion Surrender (1973) with John McLaughlin and Illuminations (1974) with Alice Coltrane, Jack DeJohnette and Jules Broussard. The guitarist leaves a lot of room to percussion, saxophone and keyboards to set moods ("Spring Manifestations"), as well as lengthy solos by himself ("Promise of a Fisherman") and vocals ("Give and Take", a funky guitar-led song). The record was released in a shiny blue sleeve displaying a butterfly, an allusion to the album Butterfly Dreams (1973) by Brazilian musician Flora Purim and her husband Airto Moreira, whose contributions deeply influenced the sound of Borboletta. In Portuguese, borboleta means "butterfly".