For my choice this week, I am going back some 54 years to my youth. I would have
been 12 years old when I first heard this song, or tune, to be more precise.
The composer of the tune has said that it "was conceived in New York City on a Sunday afternoon; I opened the window. I saw this man in the street; he was drunk, and he had a saxophone and a bottle of booze in his back pocket. And I kept looking at him because he kept struggling with himself. He couldn't make up his mind which one to put in his mouth; first, the saxophone or the bottle, and I immediately heard a song. I wrote the whole thing right there."
It was also my introduction to the world of blues guitar; although this tune is not really a blues one, the languid playing style led me to true blues artists like Gary Moore, Danny Gatton, Roy Buchanan and Peter Green, to name but four legends. And as if that was not enough, it also turned me on to the Hammond Organ, here deliciously dueting with the lead guitar and played by Gregg Rolie, who later formed the band Journey!
The band released their second album on 23 September 1970; the title originates from a line in Hermann Hesse's 1919 book Demian and is quoted on the album's back cover:
"We stood before it and began to freeze inside from the exertion. We questioned the painting, berated it, made love to it, prayed to it: We called it mother, called it whore and slut, called it our beloved, called it Abraxas…"
And so, without further ado, here is Carlos Santana's composition "Samba pa ti" (Samba for you) from Santana's second album, Abraxas:
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