Viva El Mariachi!

Yesterday I had the rare privilege of watching a master at the peak of his powers. Carlos Santana was performing in Singapore, and I was there.

He played without a pause for nearly three hours. And he had me on my feet without a pause for nearly three hours. To be honest, I had not expected it. I was apprehensive about going to a show where everyone was assigned a numbered seat. And I was not reassured when I got into mine. Sitting in the stands in the Singapore Indoor Stadium at the far end from the stage, I did not exactly feel like I was in the middle of the music. It felt more like watching a concert video on high-definition TV.

But a couple of songs into the set I realized that the place to be was at the back where there was room to dance. And from that point on the evening turned into magic.

I had a blinding flash of reality soon afterwards. It suddenly hit home for me that I was watching someone who had played at the legendary Woodstock festival. And in the time since then he has been making music for nearly four decades. He's been performing for longer than I've been alive. And last night he played with a passion that has not been dimmed by the years, nor been perverted by wave after wave of musical fads and fashions.

It must seem to him a long way from the days when he was an upcoming musician in San Franciso and was rather obscurely described as a purveyor of 'mariachi samba-rock". Whatever the heck that means. And I'm sure the width of a universe lies between a muddy field in Max Yasgur's farm southwest of Woodstock, and the crisp air-conditioned interior of an indoor arena in squeaky-clean Singapore.

I remember watching Woodstock, the movie, while I was still in college. (It remains for me the best Martin Scorsese film I have ever seen.) And the best part of that movie was Soul Sacrifice, an eleven-minute opus with which Santana ended his set. At some point last night, time contracted and distance disappeared when the beat of conga drums laid the rhythm for the flickering, insolent guitar intro to Soul Sacrifice, and I could pretend to myself that I had been transported back to the golden age of peace, love and music.