Two Santana classics

I had a gift voucher for a music download site and after buying a main album I had a couple of dollars left so I picked two instrumentals I love from the Santana body of work: Incident at Neshabur and Europa.


Incident at Neshabur comes from Abraxas, what I regard the best of classic Santana albums. The cover painting is very psychedelic. The nomenclature of the album is steeped in intrigue. The album title is taken a line from Hermann Hesse's novel Demian. Toussaint L'Ouverture, one of the tracks, was also the leader of the first successful slave revolt in Haiti. And I was sorely puzzled over what incident happened at Neshabur. This was pre-Internet, so it took me many years to discover that Neshabur, or Nishapur, was a great city in Persia, now Iran. Still that didn't explain what incident happened there. Recently I came across this article in KeyboardMag that had a bit more detail about Alberto Gianquinto, the co-composer with Carlos Santana of and the blues pianist in that piece. The album was released at the tail end of the heady days of flower power and Gianquinto was making some kind of political statement, but nobody was sure what, they just thought it was a cool name.


As for the piece itself, it is extraordinary the changes of pace and metre it goes through. It starts off as a hard-driving jam by guitar, bongo, electric organ and piano. It's a showpiece for the guitarist where he gets to employ distortion and sustain but also delicately pluck notes. But the pianist also gets to carry a lovely melody towards the end. For some reason, when listening to the second half, I have always had a mental image of a cavernous room in dim crimson light while the sustained notes resonate through the room, and as the piece progresses towards its gentle finish, you could hear a pin drop as the audience is rapt in silent appreciation. I have lost track of the number of times I've listened to it on headphones in the dark.


As for Europa from the Amigos album, the name comes from the Greek myth of course, because of the secondary title Earth's Cry Heaven's Smile, but I don't think any overt statement was intended, it is just a very lyrical showpiece for electric guitar. It has an amazing prolonged sustain towards the end.