The musician that made Carlos Santana feel musically illiterate: “Makes me feel like a two-year-old”
There’s not many things which can faze Carlos Santana. Being able to strum a few chords together is quite literally child’s play.
But put the man in front of one specific jazz master, and he would be a quivering wreck, much like a naughty schoolboy sent into the corner. Of course, it’s one thing to claim you would be intimidated or silenced into submission by being in the sheer presence of your hero, but in Santana’s case, this specific musician essentially made him forget everything he ever thought he knew.
It’s certainly high praise and pressure to place on someone, no matter how prolific they may be, but Santana inherently knew that Wayne Shorter would be able to rise to that seemingly insurmountable challenge. The jazz virtuoso also inhabited a similarly unflappable persona – but the only difference was, if you were to put Santana in his orbit, he would simply crumble.
This is not a criticism of the frontman; after all, put any of us in front of our ultimate musical guiding lights and we may also melt into blubbering messes. Yet at least he isn’t too absorbed to admit this, as in a 2022 interview, he confessed that if he were to meet Shorter, he may indeed just have crumbled.
“I need to know the architectural order of someone like Wayne Shorter. For me, listening to his music makes me feel like a two-year-old, like I don’t know anything about music,” he said. “And I need to crawl out of the crib and find how that order relates.” Making it seem like he was only starting out on the building blocks while Shorter was building palaces, Santana was doing himself a little bit of a disservice.
But this was testament to the sheer power and enthral of the jazz icon, who lit a massive spark of inspiration underneath the band leader. “I can understand the blues, but I need to learn more cycles. So I’m trying to stretch out a bit on the guitar now, make that leap to a new level. I don’t know if I’m gonna succeed or fail, but I’m definitely hungry for it,” Santana explained.
Of course, Shorter was more than accustomed to mingling in some pretty elite sonic circles over the course of his lifetime, whether it was starting out alongside Miles Davis in his Second Great Quintet or playing with Jaco Pistorius in Weather Report. It was perhaps just a reflection of Santana’s own self-esteem that he felt he paled in comparison.
Sadly, it seemed that he was never destined to find out his hero’s take on his own musical masteries, following Shorter’s passing in 2023. Yet it was already more than clear that no matter what happened, his sound and impact would always transcend the generations and masses, and forever remain the North Star for Santana, wherever he goes.
For anyone wondering, that’s the power of what makes a real musical genius. It’s not in how many singles you release or how many viral hits you can clock up – it’s in the fact that you can reduce even some of the most prolific artists into screaming fans, as soon as you set foot on a stage. For Santana, that’s evidently a mantra he’s trying to live by.
