{"id":167869,"date":"2025-08-23T00:57:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-23T00:57:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/167869\/"},"modified":"2025-08-23T00:57:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T00:57:13","slug":"the-untraditional-guitarist-carlos-santana-adored","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/167869\/","title":{"rendered":"The “untraditional” guitarist Carlos Santana adored"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Carlos<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Apple Music)<\/p>\n

Fri 22 August 2025 21:30, UK <\/p>\n

Carlos Santana<\/a> has never been one to stay within strict confines when making music, and that can only ever be seen as a good thing. <\/p>\n

When you listen to the way he plays and the multiple songs he\u2019s written, it\u2019s impossible not to recognise just how many great tracks he\u2019s written over the years. There is no genre that he has ever forced himself to stay within, and there is no scale, sound, or style he has ever been so devoted to that he isn\u2019t willing to look outside of them. Listening to his discography is deeply exciting, as with each song and album comes a new possibility of what you may be presented with. <\/p>\n

When the Montreux Jazz Festival started up<\/a>, it was, as many might be able to predict, a festival that showcased jazz. These days, every genre under the sun is brandished there, but this isn\u2019t something that occurred slowly; it only took the festival a matter of years before they started booking artists from various genres to perform.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The festival\u2019s justification for this was that jazz doesn\u2019t have to just be a genre but could also be interpreted as a state of mind. It represents freedom, experimentation, romanticism, and all musicians being connected throughout the genre by a passion for the instrument they play. Some of the greatest strides in music have been made by jazz artists such as Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra. They made these strides not just by expanding upon what jazz music consisted of, but by showing how music was there to be twisted. <\/p>\n

Carlos Santana was one of the first non-jazz artists to headline<\/a> the Montreux Jazz Festival, but when you consider embracing the genre as a state of mind rather than a strict style of music, this makes perfect sense.\u00a0In the same way jazz artists twisted an established genre, Santana took rock and guitar music and injected it with various styles. His means of playing are undefinable, and that\u2019s what draws people to it. <\/p>\n

Santana has always leaned on the unconventional side of music. His connection with sound is through his guitar; what style of music, effect, or song that comes out of that guitar is irrelevant so long as Santana feels close to it. It\u2019s a sweet way to look at music making, and it\u2019s something he looks for not only in his own sound but that made by those he idolises as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When discussing guitarists who played in an unconventional style, Santana listed Jeff Beck as one of his favourites, saying that he was able to tap into a means of playing that other guitarists would struggle to fathom. What the average guitar lover would give to be transported to a London venue while Jeff Beck was making a name for himself, fingers dancing up and down the fret, distortion piercing ears, and an animalistic showing of the guitarist in an entertaining way that didn\u2019t just involve standing there and playing. <\/p>\n

Beck was an outstanding guitarist, and during his time in The Yardbirds and playing as a solo artist, he was able to accelerate guitar music to the stratosphere. It wasn\u2019t just about playing to support a singer; guitarists had their own tone of voice, style, panache and ways of playing. He remains one of the most exciting, energetic and emotive artists ever to pick up a six-string.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cJeff Beck took guitar way beyond,\u201d said Santana, \u201cHis approach was like letting the hamster out of the cage [\u2026] \u201cI was a big fan of Jeff from the second I heard him play. What I loved most was his imagination and passion. He was a very untraditional player, even though he had learned the traditional approach to blues to start with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unconventional artists are those who wind up paving the way for the future of music. It\u2019s one thing being able to operate in an established genre, but to be able to take an established sound and drag it outside of its label is what winds up being written in the history books; Santana and Jeff Beck both make up large sections of these storied texts.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Apple Music) Fri 22 August 2025 21:30, UK Carlos Santana has never been one…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":167870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96302,171,96303,975,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-167869","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-carlos-santana","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-jeff-beck","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115075366907567217","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}