During those years, Santana released a series of introspective, mostly instrumental albums inspired by Eastern mysticism, meditation and the sensibilities of guru Sri Chimnoy and latter-day John Coltrane. By then Santana had been a star. He’d dazzled Woodstock a few years earlier, had hits like “Evil Ways,” “Jingo” and “Black Magic Woman” (still his biggest, last year’s fatuous Grammy notwithstanding) and had already achieved guitar-god status. But instead of continuing forward in that direction, he took a spiritual, noncommercial interlude.
Whatever his reasons (and it may have just been the wind), it was sincere if nothing else; irony wasn’t part of the mix. Om meant om. It became passe fast, and so did Santana, with one mediocre record following the next as the ’70s wobbled into the ’80s.
Now, with “Divine Light” (out next week from Columbia Legacy), Bill Laswell, bassist, composer, producer, master of the remix, ubiquitous in Downtown music circles, has done a worthy “reconstruction and mix translation” of two of Santana’s recordings from that time-“Love, Devotion, Surrender” and “Illuminations.” Both of those albums were collaborations. The first was with McLaughlin; the other with Alice Coltrane. Both were done in the spirit of John Coltrane: “Love, Devotion, Surrender,” has interpretations of “A Love Supreme” and “Naima” (the name of Coltrane’s first wife), and “Illuminations” is colored with Alice Coltrane’s ethereal harp.
And while the record cover art and the names of the songs (“Angel of Air,” “Bliss, the Eternal Now”) all seem laughably of the time, somehow the music-and the ethos-was ahead of its time. Where was yoga chic when Santana needed to sell some records?
“No one really got it then but I think people are thinking more like that now, and I’m sure there’s a huge audience that hasn’t heard that music or didn’t know it existed,” says Laswell at a midtown Manhattan restaurant.
Laswell’s M.O. was this: he took the master tapes, added bits that never made it onto the final recording (more flutes and tablas), rejiggered here and there, edited parts out (the oms, thankfully, and some of McLaughlin’s excesses) and, most effectively, added transitions between tracks so that it plays almost as a suite-a hippie-dippy one, but something Ellington might approve of. The two original records (both less than 40 minutes each) are now one 60-minute whole-different but, well, faithful to the originals. “I like that concept when you’re dealing with trance music or ambient,” he says. “You just get into a flow, and you don’t want to come out.”
It’s the same approach he took with the exceptional “Panthalassa,” his 1997 remix of Miles Davis’s early ’70s electric-funk period. It was heralded by critics and sold well, especially among nonjazz fans. “Everybody was happy,” Laswell says. It’s what allowed him to go on with the original deal with Columbia, which, in addition to the Miles and Santana remixes, included Herbie Hancock’s influential “Future Shock” (which Laswell produced in 1983) and “Sound System.” “But I don’t think we would’ve been allowed to continue if it wasn’t working moneywise.” Since it has thus far, Laswell is planning still another Santana remix-with “the blessing of Carlos”-of the albums “Welcome” and “Caravanserai,” another all-instrumental piece, which Laswell calls “a masterpiece” (and rightly so).
What all of these records illustrate (and what “Divine Light” and Laswell quietly celebrate) is Santana’s pluralism and how in that way, too, his band was ahead of its time. Before racial schisms divided pop music, before whites began rapping, Carlos Santana had a racially ambiguous band.
“Santana wasn’t my idol but to me his band was very important,” Laswell says. “It broke down a race thing. If you saw Santana’s band you didn’t know if someone was black or white or Spanish or whatever. His band created this new race. Which was hip-at the time.”
It’s what makes Santana a perfect vehicle for Laswell to reinterpret, reconstruct, revive. The 47-year-old perennially goateed Midwesterner moved to New York in the late ’70s and has since worked with an incredibly diverse collection of musicians: Mick Jagger, John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Jah Wobble, Sly and Robbie, Killah Priest of the Wu Tang Klan, Henry Threadgill, the list goes on. And he loves (and more than dabbles in) world music: He works often with the tabla players Zakir Hussain and Talvin Singh; he’s done a mix translation of Irish music, “Shape Shifting”; he has a CD of scores he’s done for various French films (the names of which he can’t remember) coming out on Zorn’s Tzadik label, and he is currently producing an Ethiopian pop record with Wayne Shorter and Pharaoh Sanders as guests.
He moves with ease between various styles: bass and drum, ambient, techno, out jazz, reggae. In fact, one of his best-known records is a controversial remix he did of Bob Marley tunes, in which he dubbed out the lyrics. (“That drove a lot of people crazy,” he says bashfully.)
He’s an old-school hipster, rarely pictured without black hat, but has the same paranoia of Los Angeles as, say, Woody Allen. He’s approached often to do Hollywood soundtracks, but, he says, “I hate Hollywood, I hate L.A. I hate dealing with those people. As soon as they start talking I hang up the phone. It’s another world, and I don’t know how to communicate.”
He lives on Manhattan’s West Side and has a studio in West Orange, N.J., the Grand Slam, where Jethro Tull, the Kinks and Aerosmith once recorded. (“It’s quiet out there now, just some good hip-hoppers.”) The Bob Marley and Miles Davis remixes brought him more notoriety than he’s used to. The Santana and the upcoming Herbie Hancock might do the same; his remixes are becoming events. But Laswell is happy being Laswell, that is, to himself, in his studio, anonymous. “You just hope people like the music,” he says. “That’s all. I’ve was pretty lucky to work with whoever I liked while they were alive-and even when they weren’t.”
