The most singular guitarist Carlos Santana has ever heard: “Turbo blues”
While there are many guitarists who people consider to be singular in their talents, not many are quite as revered as Mexican jazz and blues player Carlos Santana for how he managed to inject a Latin flair into the American traditional style.
Having begun his career in the mid-1960s, he would eventually go on to become a worldwide phenomenon during a period where blues-influenced music was declining in popularity, with newer permutations in rock music becoming the standard around this time.
This doesn’t mean that Santana was late to the party, or that he was trying to peddle a style of music that felt out of date, because what he was doing was truly unique and provided a different spin on a genre of music that people were already familiar with, and went about rewriting the rulebook through his often psychedelic and freewheeling style.
However, much like all other guitarists of his era, his influences still came from somewhere, and there’s no way in which you can label a player like Santana as being truly unique due to the fact that he drew inspiration from various others who came before him, especially the American greats who were setting the bar during the 1950s.
It was these players who were the greatest inspiration to the rock and blues groups from outside of the States and caused the movement to expand and continue on a worldwide scale throughout the subsequent decade, but there was one in particular whose electrifying playing style touched Santana more than any other guitarist he’d ever heard.
Speaking about Buddy Guy, he proclaimed that without his influence, there would be a whole host of other legendary blues guitarists who never existed or found their own styles, and commented that one of his later releases, ‘Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues’, is perhaps the most shining example of his brilliance.
“Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, they’re all great, but the guy my British brothers and me all learned from is Buddy Guy,” Santana argued. “That’s the guy. There wouldn’t be Jimi Hendrix without Buddy Guy, you know? He invented turbo blues. And you can hear it on this song. Nobody plays like him.”
While Guy was not necessarily popular or well-known early on in his career, he’s still revered by many of the aforementioned guitarists as being a true trailblazer, especially within the Chicago blues scene. While he would later experience a career renaissance with the 1991 release of this song, taken from the album of the same name, it was a celebration of an artist who came long after the time when he should have been more widely recognised.
For Santana to acknowledge the truth about Guy, stating that without his influence and aggressive playing style, there would never have been a flurry of activity within blues rock in the late ‘60s, is a true indication of his knowledge and understanding of what makes blues music so special. Recognising Guy as one of the greats is something that only other legendary players tend to do, and for Santana to realise his importance is a sign of just how extraordinary he is.
