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Santana
Multi Dimensional Warrior
(Legacy)
First Appeared in The Music Box, October 2008, Volume 15, #10
Written by John Metzger
Tue October 14, 2008, 06:30 AM CDT
Numerous retrospectives have been assembled from the many recordings that
Carlos Santana has made over the years. Not surprisingly, however, all of them
have been built around the same suite of songs: Oye Como Va, Black
Magic Woman, Evil Ways, and Everybody’s Everything, among
them. Because they hold such tremendous commercial appeal, record labels rarely
waver from including hit singles whenever an overview of a performer’s career is
crafted. Although this approach maximizes profits, it also is a strategy that
artistically yields diminishing returns because, more often than not, each
iteration says less about its subject than the effort that preceded it. To
counter this, companies have turned toward concocting comprehensive multi-disc
collections rather than mere 10-track endeavors, frequently peppering them with
previously unavailable archival material to lure devoted followers as well as
casual fans. Nevertheless, there rarely is more than one opportunity to get a
boxed set right.
Despite his constant efforts to chase the charts, Santana’s appeal to pop
music fans has waxed and waned from year to year. With the release of
Supernatural in 1999, however, he once again broke through to the
mainstream, winning a slew of Grammy Awards in the process. Considering his
success of late, it wouldn’t be a mistake to view Multi Dimensional Warrior,
the latest retrospective glimpse at Santana’s career, as a contemporary attempt
at summarizing his return to stardom, and in a sense, this is precisely what the
outing is. Refreshingly, though, Multi Dimensional Warrior follows a
completely different path to its destination. Forsaking the familiar fare from
his canon, the guitarist — who sculpted the endeavor himself — used an array of
lesser known songs to paint a wide-sweeping portrait of his efforts. In fact,
all of his recent collaborations with contemporary pop stars are noticeably
absent from Multi Dimensional Warrior, leaving the collection free to dig
deeper and uncover the diverse textures in which he still revels.
Anyone who has followed Santana’s career closely likely is aware that there
always have been two distinct facets to his output. Not only does he have an
unwavering desire to fit within the landscape of the pop music scene, but he
also has never failed to smash stylistic barriers with his exploratory
improvisations. To emphasize these sometimes opposing tendencies, Multi
Dimensional Warrior is split evenly between vocal tracks and instrumental
passages, each of which has been sequestered on its own disc. Nevertheless,
within each subset it is possible to hear the yin and yang that, for better or
for worse, have tugged and pulled at everything Santana has touched since
issuing his self-titled debut in 1969.
Forget for a moment that the bulk of Right Now sounds like a funky
version of Journey’s middle-of-the-road brand of power pop. Undeniably, the
heart of the song is designed specifically to fit within the framework of
commercial radio circa 1985 — which is, after all, what Santana always has tried
to accomplish with his work. Its conclusion, however, deftly moves through a
riveting assault of driving, Latin rhythms. By contrast, on the non-vocal
performances, Santana sheds his R&B inclinations in order to emphasize his
fondness for jazz and blues styles. Yet, at the same time, he laces his
evocative and moody invocations with synthesizers and keyboards, which
inevitably tie these passages back to his pop-oriented persona.
Perhaps the biggest drawback to Santana’s approach on Multi Dimensional
Warrior is that more than three-quarters of the material that he selected
for inclusion on the set was culled from the albums that he has released
throughout the past 23 years. During this time, pop music increasingly has
become a manufactured commodity that is too slick for its own good. For Santana,
trying to mold his work to achieve placement alongside contemporary artists
inevitably stifles his creative energy and does some serious damage to his
compositions. His guitar solos remain electrifying, but wading through the
mediocrity — particularly during many of the cuts on the first half of the
endeavor — is nearly unbearable.
In the end, Multi Dimensional Warrior draws nearly identical
conclusions about his output as the numerous other compilations in his canon.
Although it places the best possible spin upon his joyful affirmations — which
at their core have changed very little over the years — it also is impossible to
mistake the organic essence that erupts from Samba Pa Ti, one of the few
cuts to be featured from his early days. Newcomers to Santana’s work likely will
find Multi Dimensional Warrior to be rather enlightening, while longtime
fans will drift in and out of focus, gravitating primarily to the moments when
he simply plays his guitar.  ½
Of Further Interest...
Pouya Mahmoodi - Mehr
Pat Martino - El Hombre: Rudy Van Gelder Remasters
Tito Puente - Live at the 1977 Monterey Jazz Festival
Multi Dimensional Warrior is available from
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Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2008 The Music Box
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