april 16, 2025

Published april 16, 2025 by ad-vinylrecords with 0 comment

Carlos Santana - Havana Moon (1983) (LP) - €20,00

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Havana Moon is a solo album by Carlos Santana, released in 1983.

It features covers of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry songs and performances by Booker T Jones, Willie Nelson and the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and also Carlos' father José singing "Vereda Tropical", a song Carlos had first heard when his father was serenading his mother following an argument.
The third Carlos Santana solo album marks a surprising turn toward 1950s rock & roll and Tex-Mex, with covers such as Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love" and Chuck Berry's title song. Produced by veteran R&B producers Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett, the album features an eclectic mix of sidemen, including Booker T. Jones of Booker T & the MG's, Willie Nelson, and the Fabulous Thunderbirds. 
Havana Moon is a light effort, but it's one of Santana's most enjoyable albums, which may explain why it was also the best-selling Santana album outside the group releases in ten years.

Havana Moon is Carlos Santana's Tex-Mex album. Granted, the pairing of this Latin-rock guitarist with a Texas-based blues band like the Fabulous Thunderbirds is not an image that would readily come to most people's minds when they thought of Tex-Mex music. 
But for Santana, who grew up in Tijuana listening to the likes of Bobby Bland and Jimmy Reed, a song like Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love" is as much a part of his musical background as a traditional Spanish ballad like "Vereda Tropical," and both of those tunes are included on this LP. 
More to the point, Santana connects several disparate strains with remarkable ease. 
"Who Do You Love," for example, uses the same nasty shuffle beat as Diddley's original 1956 recording but mixes in an underpinning of Latin percussion that doesn't so much change the beat as enhance it. Similarly, "Havana Moon" manages to present the Caribbean rhythms Chuck Berry's version could only imply, yet the song never loses its rock & roll charm.
Santana's new take on the Tex-Mex connection is so inspired, in fact, that it's hard to understand why he didn't go all the way with it. Beyond "Who Do You Love" and "Havana Moon," only three other selections feature the T-Birds, and two of those are jazzy instrumentals that owe as much to keyboardist Booker T. Jones (who plays on four T-Bird cuts and sings "Havana Moon") as to Santana. 
The rest of Havana Moon is given over to various odds and ends, ranging from such predictable Latin rockers as "Watch Your Step," which sounds like a leftover from Abraxas, to such unlikely efforts as "They All Went Down to Mexico," a dreary joke featuring Willie Nelson and a bored Santana rhythm section. 
It's not so much that Havana Moon is inconsistent–although it's that, too – as it is confusing, jumping from style to style as if Carlos Santana weren't sure what he wanted to do.


Side A
A1.  Watch Your Step - 3:49
        Lead Vocals – Greg Walker
A2.  Lightnin’ - 3:50
A3.  Who Do You Love - 2:54
        Lead Vocals – Kim Wilson
A4.  Mudbone - 5:50
A5.  One With You - 5:17
        Lead Vocals – Booker T. Jones

Side B
B1.  Ecuador - 1:10
B2.  Tales Of Kilimanjaro - 4:51
B3.  Havana Moon - 4:11
        Lead Vocals – Booker T. Jones
B4.  Daughter Of The Night - 4:18
        Vocals – Greg Walker
B5.  They All Went To Mexico - 4:59
        Vocals – Willie Nelson
B6.  Vereda Tropical - 4:58


Companies, etc.

Credits

Notes
Release: 1983
Format:  LP, Vinyl
Genre:  Latin Rock
Label:  CBS
Catalog#  25350

Vinyl:  Goed (VG)
Cover:  Goed (VG)

Prijs: €20,00

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