Santana Lotus (1974)

From New Musical Express Max Bell 20 Dec 1975

Over one hundred Santana fans coughed up the full twenty pounds for this triple live album when it first appeared on import.

Some no doubt were expecting new material. Hardly too much to ask either as there’s been no studio album since Borboletta, while the McLaughlin into Coltrane episode, a rather euphemistically entitled Greatest Hits collection, and the return to Abraxas for concert material seem to indicate that Carlos has dried up for the time being.

Lotus is now available at the new reduced price of ten pounds ‘cos they only have to ship it from Holland as opposed to Tokyo and what a jolly piece of incontinence it is to be sure.

Recorded and designed in Japan the whole visual concept reeks of a tasteless Godhead and joss stick mentality with one of those baffling sleeves that unfolds for ever and turns into something utterly useless, like a paper aeroplane featuring the woman from the Asian greengrocers grinning out of the cockpit.

Musically, the albums do present the best ever Santana band, the one situated midway between Caravanserai and the world tour of’73.

Keyboards men Tom Coster and Richard Kermode had replaced Gregg Rolie (which was a good thing since what they lost in guts they gained in sheer ability) while much the same could be said for new bassist Doug Rauch; only the loss of second guitarist Need Schon harmed the overall sound, because not only was Schon a perfect foil for Santana, he was frequently a more interesting musician.

It looked as if this nucleus would produce something special and lasting, and they did with Caravanserai.

Unfortunately at no time does this set equal the exhilaration, of the comparable Wembley shows either in terms of performance or atmosphere.

The audience sound enthusiastic but polite, and that sums up the music.

You’d have to be a real devotee to sit through some of the thirty odd cuts and find anything appreciably more exciting in them than their studio counterparts.

Old faves like ‘Black Magic Woman’, ‘Se A Cabo’ and ‘Savor’ are a hindrance to progression maybe but they tower into significance alongside the two minutes of silent meditation on side one or Mike Shrieve’s tedious drum solo ‘Kyoto’.

An overall impression of blandness isn’t helped by the strange machinations of a Sony sound crew led by Hideto Isoda.

The quality is superb but Coster and Kermode sound frequently remote allowing the Latin percussion far too much prominence.

Side three makes coherent sense beginning with Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘Stone Flower’ and, crossing through nicely connected music, ‘Waiting’. Chick Corea’s sumptuous Spanish jazz composition ‘Castillos De Arena’ and a version of ‘Samba De Sausalito’ that lets Coster show off his electric piano skills to the full.

Most of the previously unrecorded material is pretty duff, ‘Batukada’, ‘Mantra’ and ‘Xibaba’ are the worst kind of insipid techno muzak that Santana stick to when at a loss for anything better.

There are flashes of former brilliance in the monumental build-up to ‘Every Step Of The Way’ where Shrieve, Jose Areas and Roach latch onto a crushing rhythm and Santana drives his power chords over the beat.

Even the inevitable ‘Samba Pa Ti’ recovers after Carlos has milked the solos rotten and develops into an enterprising soul-swing improvisation.

The encores are predictably ‘Toussaint L’Overture’ and ‘Incident At Neshabur’, but they’re both masterful and definitive renditions with the right mixture of flash and flair that all Santana outfits since have lacked.

Unless you feel that you can’t live without Lotus, or that if you buy it you need never buy another Santana album, I’d settle for the next genuinely current recording and laugh seasonably at those who just blew the first deposit on the new water bed.

Santana Lotus (1974)

From progarchives.com

Review by stefro

As far as 1970s rock excess goes you can’t really get more excessive than Santana’s psychedelic rock marathon ‘Lotus’, a triple-disc live offering featuring over over one-hour- and-fifty-minutes worth of music spread out over twenty-two tracks that originally was conceived as a Japan-only release. The epic running-time dwarfs many of the most ambitious rock records of the era, making seemingly-endless prog concept albums such as Yes’ double-sided paean to the Shastric scriptures ‘Tales From Topographic Oceans’ and Genesis’s similarly-sized prog opera ‘The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway’ seem brisk and economical in comparison, an achievement that is no easy feat.

The year is 1974. Latin-psych rock gods Santana, still dazed and star-kissed by the success, both critical and commercial, of their soon-to-be-seminal albums ‘Santana’, ‘Abraxus’, ‘Caravanserai’ and ‘Welcome’, are riding a wave of kudos that has seen them become one of the decade’s most recognisable and popular acts, both on record and in the live arena, throughout the Americas into Europe and beyond.

The group, headed by the liquid-fingered guitarist Carlos Santana, were performing another series of sold-out series of concerts and their focus at this time would be on the quickly-expanding, near-fanatical and highly lucrative Japanese market with Osaka the next stop on the seemingly never- ending road of gigs, parties, label events and recording sessions. Across three steamy nights, Santana’s seven-man line-up lit up the city arena with a densely-mystical rendition of their jazz-and-latin spiced brand of psychedelic rock, stretching, bending and injecting hit tunes such as ‘Black Magic Woman’, ‘Gypsy Queen’ and ‘Samba Pa Ti’ with a raw sense of creativity and improvisational ability in that way great musicians seem to be able to when clutched in the heart of a live rock event. ‘Lotus’ was, after all, a product of the now long gone time of the ‘name’ musician, a time when rock music was at it’s limitless apex, musicians enabled to push the boundaries of the limited pop formats of yesterday into boundless wonder whilst adoring audiences cheered their heroes with sycophantic glee.

Santana, the temporary rock gods that they were, lap up the good vibes enveloping their every pore and blast forth the show of their lives. Such was album’s impact and popularity that soon import copies began to make their way across the long seas to Britain, North America, Germany, Australia, Canada and France in all it’s triple-gatefold glory.

‘Lotus’ is Santana in full-flowing, awe-inspiring mode, a mode that wouldn’t again be reached on their upcoming studio albums that would slowly-but-surely decline in quality as the seventies wore on, punk began it’s bloody cull and the eighties started to rise up in the distance like a panting, slavering, neon-coloured dog ready to devour the last vestiges of creativity an originality. ‘Lotus’, therefore, is two significant items.

Firstly it is one of the great live rock albums of all time; secondly, it is the last great Santana album. Beauty tinged with sadness, brilliance filled with inevitability.

Review by Sean Trane

This triple live album originally recorded in in Osaka, Japan over two night in early July 73, was intended as a Japan-only release, but soon found its way worldwide as an import, as far as vinyl’s are concerned, something that stopped with the Cd re-issue. For the rest of the world, Moonflower was released in 76 instead, and it was a strange mix of live and studio tracks, and it has its charms as well. Lotus catches the Santana band between its two more or less stable period, as there are still embers of the first line-up, and not everyone of the second period (Amigos) is there yet. Coming in with a very elaborate fold out artwork, this album rivals with Yes’ Yessongs in terms of number f discs (3 each) and complex artwork, only to be topped by Chicago’s quadruple Carnegie boxset. As usual in that hippie era, the artwork of the band is slightly esoteric, mainly due to Carlos’ Yogi enrolment and while the illustrations are quite kitsch, they’ll not likely convert anyone either.

Starting with a Japanese introduction, the group licks with a homage to Alice Coltrane with a wurlitzer and a wink to the Illuminations album. Then plunging into the ecstatic 12-minutes finale of Caranserai, one wonders if Santana is not laying down its trumps too early in the game, but which fan is not won over by these early sure-fire numbers. Then the band pulls out even more sure crowd favourites like the trio Magic, Gypsy and Como tracks from the Abraxas album…. After Yours Is The Light (Welcome) and a few more less remarkable number, the group launches into an adventurous medley (normally taking up the whole second vinyl disc) of tracks with Castillos jumping into Free Angela (Davis) and Sausalito and a then unreleased antra track (now a very-welcome bonus on the Welcome album), showing that Santana is not only extremely tight, but loves tricky and complex times sigs and great jazz-rock solos.

The second disc offers the end of the Castillos De Arena medley passing through a 10- minutes drum solo (the album’s only weak point, really) in superb fireworks of notes from the whole group. A second set of three Abraxas tracks, including the much expanded Accident At Neshabur and Samba Pa Ti come in to close the set, before the encores including an explosive Toussaint from their third album.

In Lotus, we’ve got Santana at their near-best and Lotus is now a 2 Cd set that must be considered the most essential live Santana along with the 68 Fillmore. The only flaw of this album is that it doesn’t offer double the space to put everything else we’d love to hear from Carlos’ boys, including Jingo, more Caravanserai and some Borboletta (almost forgotten here)

Santana Lotus (1974)

From soundstageexperience.com

Released only in Japan as a three-LP set in 1974, as an import Lotus became a popular staple on campus FM radio stations — for its exclusivity, its superior quadraphonic CBS SQ matrix sound, and its long, jazz-based jams. It was Santana’s equivalent to the Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore East and the Grateful Dead’s Europe ’72. Recorded live in Osaka on July 3 and 4, 1973, Lotus included extended versions of compositions from Santana’s four studio albums to that point, as well as numbers that would appear on Welcome, the 1973 album that would announce firmly that the band was now more jazz- than rock-oriented.

In his highly introspective autobiography, The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story To Light, Carlos Santana writes about a definitive meeting in 1972 with then-Columbia Records head Clive Davis, when the guitarist and bandleader took a firm stand against “going back” to the band’s Latin-rock roots, which had taken it to stardom with its second album, Abraxas, and its appearance in the film Woodstock.

Despite the lack of a single on the band’s fourth album, Caravanserai, Santana stuck to his guns and refused to return to the studio to record something that would be more commercial in Davis’s eyes. In retrospect, Santana wrote that what mattered most to him was the response his new music received from his peers rather than how many times it was played on mainstream radio.

Even given the times — when jazz-rock fusion bands like John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, Chick Corea’s Return To Forever, and Weather Report were in their ascendancy — Santana’s move toward longer, more open-ended musical forms was unusual for someone who had scored a couple of hit songs. Most artists move toward the popular middle ground, or continue to work that ground once they’ve found triumph there. But after three years of rapidly increasing success, which was the culmination of a long scuffle that carried young Carlos from Mexico to San Francisco, the guitarist was ready for a change.

Although Santana had come from a blues foundation, he was drawn strongly to the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, thanks to the insistence of drummer Michael Shrieve. While he wasn’t an instrumental virtuoso, Santana recognized that he had a sound, a signature voice. Although he could not escape the limitations of the chromatic scale to any great degree, the tone of his guitar was immediately identifiable — no small achievement, especially at a time when his rivals were tonal masters like Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Dickey Betts, and Jerry Garcia.

On what is arguably the early Santana band’s musical peak — its third studio album, released in 1971 — Carlos had found an ideal partner in the young Neal Schon. Just 15, Schon allowed Carlos to focus more on tonal projection, rather than having to carry the entire weight of both lead and rhythm guitar parts. But Schon’s tenure with Santana was relatively short, and by 1973 he and Santana co-founder Gregg Rolie had left to start Journey and Carlos was back on his own. He compensated by handing a much bigger role to keyboardists Tom Coster and Richard Kermode.

Another challenge that the breakup of the original Santana band posed was the loss of a strong, distinctive lead vocalist. Rolie had handled most of the singing on the band’s first three albums, and his departure left a big void. Although the band had demonstrated a desire to shift the balance of its repertoire toward more instrumental pieces, the reality was that audiences still expected to hear hits like “Black Magic Woman” and “Evil Ways.” As Santana notes in his autobiography, some audience members interrupted the quieter moments on the band’s 1972 tour to make their displeasure known. So he knew he had to make concessions, but only within limits.

In what was the single largest indication of the bandleader’s desire to become more focused on jazz, Leon Thomas was hired as lead vocalist. A native of East St. Louis, Thomas had cut his teeth as the singer with Count Basie’s band in the ’60s, but what set him apart was his attraction to Coltrane’s music. On Pharoah Sanders’s album Karma and his own recordings, Thomas utilized yodeling to approximate Coltrane’s sound, but that somewhat gimmicky technique tended to obscure what was a huge, lusty, tenor voice. In many ways, he was the ideal singer for an electric band with multiple percussionists, and he certainly leant some jazz cred to Santana’s desire for his group to be more than just another rock band.

By the time the octet hit the stage in Osaka, they had been on the road for months, playing more than 50 shows since the previous year. Along with Santana, Thomas, Coster, and Kermode, the lineup included bassist Doug Rauch, percussionist Armando Peraza, and charter members Shrieve and José Areas. In his book, Santana compares Coster to Keith Jarrett, while Kermode, he wrote, was more akin to Corea.

The guitarist’s allusion to Jarrett and Corea shows that he had been listening to Miles Davis’s recent band, which featured both keyboardists in an unusual combination. While Davis’s arrangements had Corea playing a highly modulated Fender Rhodes while Jarrett was free to improvise on a second electric piano, in Santana the dominant sound was electric organ. The full, rich throb of Coster’s Hammond B-3 provided a huge wave of sound for Carlos to surf on, and the guitarist’s tone — particularly vibrant on this recording — cuts through like a sabre.

This was the early ’70s, however, so electronic sound effects were in vogue with projects like this, and to 2017 ears, there is a measure too much “phasers on stun” synth work.

Another minor quibble is with the way the rhythm section transitions between songs. Since Areas, Peraza, and Shrieve were all Santana veterans by this point, it would seem to be an issue with these particular performances rather than the arrangements, but the problem may also lie in the fact that everyone except Rauch plays percussion at some point. That can lead to some awkward clashes.

But, indeed, those are quibbles, because when the band catches fire, as it does on the second part of Corea’s “Castillos de Arena,” it sounds sublime. In fact, the 30-minute segment that begins there and leads through “Incident at Neshabur,” “Se a Cabo,” and “Samba Pa Ti” may be the best half hour of music Santana ever recorded. Throughout this section, the band plays with the fire, grace, and imagination of any band of that era, including the transcendent original Allman Brothers led by Duane Allman. Carlos sounds like he has truly moved into the mindspace of Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix, and his liberal quotes from Coltrane standards “My Favorite Things” and “Afro-Blue,” along with the Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill,” illustrate how far he has stepped outside the territory he occupied in his earlier career.

The sound on this Audio Fidelity reissue restores the astounding separation of the original vinyl, and the SACD remastering by Steve Hoffman and Stephen Marsh makes the percussion pop like never before. Carlos’s guitar has never sounded better, and added to the fire he brings to this performance, his tone cements this recording’s place as the pinnacle of this band’s history.

Santana Lotus (1974)

From starling.rinet.ru

A great record, but geez… maaan… is it overkill. To tell you the truth, as of the time of writing, I have only tolerated one and a half listens, and yeah yeah, I know it’s not fair, but I’m still giving the record a high rating, so I have an excuse. Sorry. My ears are bleeding, and I don’t wanna bleed all over the keyboard.

Getting serious: this is a triple live album recorded in Japan (and maybe somewhere else) in 1973. Since then, it’s been for a long time available exclusively as a Japanese import and long considered a special “fan prize”, until recently it was finally released as a double CD, which currently makes up for about two hours worth of live Santana in their prime.

All of the performances are top notch, All of them. Perhaps the only glaring omission is ‘Soul Sacrifice’, the absence of which I lament very much, plus, I’d eagerly enjoy some of the quieter, relaxative numbers off Caravanserai, but these were probably not deemed fit for an energetic band performance. On the other hand, even the more ‘generic’ Latin numbers off the band’s earlier records (like ‘Oye Como Va’ and suchlike) really come to life, with added packs of energy and extended wailing guitar solos by Carlos.

In general, Lotus seems to feature Carlos more prominently than the rest of the band – the rest of the members are in fine form, but seem to agree to merely serve as background for Carlos. A few keyboard solos and a few vocal sections (not too many) are the only thing to distract us from Carlos’ guitar. Oh yeah, Mike Shrieve gets an obligatory percussion solo on the lengthy ‘Kyoto’, but it’s really tedious compared to his blistering workout on ‘Soul Sacrifice’.

But see, that’s the problem. No, really, Carlos is excellent, he is God and rules supreme. What can be said? The climactic arpeggios of ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture’ are passing through my head right now, and this is some of the best soloing ever captured on record. Amazing, breathtaking, emotional, spiritual… and it rocks. But see, here’s the big problem. All the songs on here sound the same: even the earlier ones, where Carlos’ guitar was somewhat subdued on the studio originals, are given the finger-flashing arpeggiated treatment (remember my complaint about the timid soloing in ‘Black Magic Woman?’ No more timidity in the version found here!).

And no matter how godly and unbelievable this soloing technique may be, after twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty minutes of it (and there’s still the second CD to go through) it just gets tedious. I mean, what the hell, if you were forced to read “Hamlet” ten times per day, you’d get sick of it pretty quickly, wouldn’t you? Lotus simply overfeeds me with classy Santana – I need a break, and all I get is a headache.

The best advice here is: this is a record that no Santana fan should be without (heck, maybe if you only want one Santana album, you could grab this one), but never make the mistake of listening to it in one sitting. Cut it in four equal parts and place distinct intervals in between them. Put on the first part, enjoy it, then go play some baseball or put on some Wallflowers or whatever crap you like to listen to, like the Beatles and stuff. Then put on the second part. Repeat procedure four times, and then the effect will be complete.

In fact, I start to feel its effectiveness now. When I first sat through the version of ‘Incident At Neshabur’ on the second CD, I felt like falling asleep, but the darned sound just didn’t let me. Now I’m listening to it again, just as a ‘selected track’, and it rules mercilessly. In fact, it entirely and completely obliterates the feeble studio version off Abraxas, with a pounding metallic rhythm section and solos that seem like sonic equivalents of destructive laser beams penetrating beneath concrete walls and blowing them all to hell.

Man, how does he do it? Has he got completely desensitized fingers or what? And plus, it’s all utterly beautiful – a rare case when finger-flashing techniques actually coincide with deep emotional resonance. Ah, Frank Zappa only wishes he could be like that…

A four star rating here, because if it were in my power, I’d easily edit Lotus down to one CD, throwing out the stupid drum solo and a couple of exceedingly redundant “spiritual wankfests”, just so that it would go down more smoothly. Such a carefully edited version would get an easy five stars.