According to Wiki: Caravanserai CAN: Gold[18] FRA: Gold[19] US: Platinum[17] Welcome CAN: Gold[18] UK: Silver[20] US: Gold[17] Borboletta UK: Silver[20] US: Gold[17]
Yeah I relistened to Moonflower the other day on my Santana kick, I remember loving it when I was younger but now I find it similarly unsatisfactory. It is too smooth for my liking, I love Lotus for what others feel is a negative, the rawness of it. Everything feels a bit glossy and cheesy, especially the synth strings, gah!! Considering how much Carlos was influenced by John Coltrane I do find the lightness of Welcome and Borboletta perplexing. Coltrane may have been spiritual and spacey but he was never light or cheesy. Love, Devotion & Surrender is much more what I would expect a Coltrane fanatic to produce. I suspect that he kept the "brand name" albums lighter and then indulged himself on his "solo" albums. Illuminations also has cheesy moments and sometimes gets lost in bells and wind chimes but is weird enough to get a pass from me.
Just footnotes on the Wiki page, I copied them by mistake as well. They just list the sources for the sales info.
Anyone like Divine Light the Bill Laswell "Reconstruction & Mix Translation" of Illumination and LDS? While it is a bit weird to mix up the albums (why not just do a remix and keep the albums in their original sequences?) it is actually a really good listen. Bill doesn't mess too much with the instrumentation or editing as he did with the Miles album he did (which was of course not a full remix of an album but a compilation of Miles tunes from the 70s). He mainly cleans up the tangled original mixes. Illuminations benefits from a crystal clear mix so all those damn bells can be heard in pristine detail. The key thing is he really brings up the bass in the mixes, you can tell he is a bassist himself! It is front and centre and really changes the whole vibe of certain tracks, they really kick!
As for addressing the original poster's love of Lotus. Touring in Japan had a unique way of inspiring certain Western musicians. Think of Frank Zappa "Black Napkins," taken from a February 3, 1976 performance in Osaka, Japan. That in my opinion is easily one of a handful of Zappa's best single performances on guitar with band, ever in his life. Then there's Deep Purple, Made In Japan, and of course eventually Cheap Trick and many others who recorded albums live in Japan. Even John Coltrane had a live (albeit posthumous) album from Japan. Here are some side thoughts. Steven Tyler of Aerosmith mentions in his autobiography, that when Aerosmith went on tour to Japan, everybody in the band was not drinking and drugging quite so much -- they basically didn't know WHERE to find any hard drugs -- so they were focusing on the music, and thus you got (in his view) a really solid batch of top-notch musical performances out of the band, all through the trip to Japan. There were fewer side distractions, and what distractions there were, were actually good distractions, pleasant ones. Plus the restrained or reserved Japanese audiences, tended to cut back on the "showmanship" or theatricality of rock-based artists. In theory at least, as a musician onstage with a quiet, very attentive audience, you quickly learn that jumping around or wearing your best snazzy wizard outfit is not really getting you a reaction from the audience, so you stop jumping around and focus instead on digging into your playing. The existing audience recordings of Zeppelin in Japan from '71 also tend to sort of bear this theory out -- they seem tight and hitting on all cylinders, really sonically focused, but missing a lot of the outlandish or overblown elements to their music that you'd find in a riotous, boozy Zeppelin gig from L.A. or Boston or New York. While Santana was a much different band from Aerosmith or Zeppelin, I could still easily see a lot of these same principles or general theories about playing in Japan, could be applying to Lotus, in a certain way. It's a musicians' album. It's an album meant for "deep" listening. Plus the acoustics in those venues in Japan were regarded as being really great. No doubt it inspired the musicians, and the fact that the venues were so quiet that you could hear a pin drop, and when you drop that pin it'd have that luscious tail of natural reverb on it....of course you'd be inclined to take every advantage of those type of sonics, as a musician in a group like Santana. So Lotus has a lot of unique interplay and dynamics between the musicians, playing off each other, they are really tuning in and hearing each other. Surely that's a big part of its charm.
After forcing myself to relisten to Welcome and Borboletta I still dislike them. As others have pointed out Carlos seemed to put the fire found in Lotus into his "solo" albums Love Devotion Surrender and Illuminations both of which feature the same adventurous music. I think I actually misunderstood that Lotus was released in 1974 but recorded in July 1973 so it is infact more of a follow on from Caravanserai which Welcome following in November 1973. It is weird that tracks like Yours Is the Light and Samba de Sausalito sounds so vital on Lotus but when recorded on Welcome they sound so weedy. This is the order of this series of albums. Caravanserai Oct 1972 Lotus July 1973 Love Devotion Surrender July 1973 Welcome Nov 1973 Illuminations - Oct 73 Borboletta - Oct 73 In my mind I see Caravanserai/Lotus/LDS/Illuminations as the true "fusion era" path for Santana with there being a diversion between Santana the band Carlos as far as branding goes. Looking at it this way I do see Welcome and Borboletta as being watered down commercialised versions of the albums listed above. I find it odd they are even lumped in with the fusion recordings as most of the songs on them are watery disco/light funk while the instrumentals fail to catch fire. I think the beauty of the first III Santana albums is they managed to make exciting adventurous music that was also commercially successful. From Caravanserai onwards the albums became much more split down the middle which I think is a shame. I feel Caravanserai did the best job of creating exciting music with still that Santana groove to it.
One of the things that has always frustrated me a bit about Carlos is his inclusion of really lightweight (I mean seriously lightweight) fluffy pop into the mix. But because my library is 100% digital and I am not a completist, I just toss a whole bunch of his stuff overboard. I most certainly agree with OP's sentiments about the Caravanserai and Lotus nexus. I only have a few tracks from the studio albums of that period. Moonflower being sort of a high point. Sort of. Really, Carlos is pretty spotty after Lotus. I really like Sacred Fire Live. But I'm not a fan at all of Supernatural. And how many live versions of Europa, Black Magic Woman, Samba..., etc. do I really need? Actually, interestingly enough for me, the first Santana record is the one I find the most rewarding in the whole catalog. It somehow seems fresher as time goes on. I find LDS extremely tedious.
The video is not from the same show. Lotus was recorded at Osaka, the video was shot in Tokyo for TV.
I like Lotus a lot, some tunes more than others- "Incident at Neshabur", "Toussaint L'Overture" and "Samba Pa Ti". But there are other live performances from that era that blow that one away, in my opinion. Check out YouTube or Wolfgang's Vault some time Music > santana at Wolfgang's As for studio releases, hey, we got Caravanserai. I'm not sure how anyone tops themselves after a record like that. (I'm partial to the quad version.) I put on Caravanserai after not hearing it for some years, and that entire era came back to me. What a vital, forward looking, transcendent, positive piece of music that is.
I started a thread related to live albums recorded at Japan some time ago: Great live albums recorded in Japan
Londoners of a certain age might remember Nicky Horne on Capital Radio hyping the crap out of Lotus as an import. It's a really good record but its legend at the time was very much linked to its rarity value and the packaging. Even as a domestic release it was bloody expensive and I am sure it sounded a lot better to my ears having parted with an awful lot of begged, borrowed and even earned pocket money to acquire it. With the benefit of hindsight it very much marks the end of an era because by the time they came back to play in London a year later (with Journey and Eric Burdon opening) they were a very different outfit from the version of the band I had fallen in love with. I was a big enough fan to have even bought the Automatic Man album and loved the more prog fusion aspects of the mid 70s line up but by November 76 Santana had not morphed into a Fania All Stars style Latin / Rock / Soul crossover act exactly but were much more down that end of the street than Return To Forever, Mahavishnu or Weather Report. It was really disappointing show spoiled by an earthing problem that meant that the quiet sections were drowned in a buzzing sound. Remains my one and only Santana live experience. Anyone else here buy Illuminations for 99p in Virgin around that time? It was one of those perennial cut outs alongside Man's "Slow Motion" and the Warner Bros Chapman Whitney album. I still have a big soft spot for both that record and "Love Devotion and Surrender".
I saw them in Manchester on that 76 tour. And was disappointed for the same reasons - I had no idea they'd changed direction and was anticipating a 2 hour Caravanserai-Borboletta bliss-out. And I had to sit through Journey.
So, Alex... What is it you don't like, the restraint, the voice itself, or perhaps just the material he's used for? To my taste, ain't nuthin' wrong with Alex.
I'll just put you down for, "no, I can't even quantify an answer between even the meager choices you offered".
Do I really need to have a definable reason for why I do or don't like an artist. Music & art are subjective, although, from an objective perspective Alex Ligertwood does not sit on the positive side of the equation for my liking. You like him. I don't. Get over it. There is no need for your condescending, superior, not to mention snarky, attitude.
