Guitar Tricks Insider August/September Issue | Page 38

COVER STORY “I play music to heal myself and heal other people and bring the world closer,” is the way he starts to answer my Charlie Rose-esque question of why do you play music? “I play music so people become aware that everything is in harmony – the planets, the weather, the birds. The only thing in disharmony is greed and lust, which is peoples egos, which is not the soul. So I play music so that people will dance together in Jerusalem – Palestinians and Hebrews. People can rejoice together in San Quentin – blacks, Latins, American Indians, and whites. I play music for that. That’s when I get the greatest joy. Most people on this planet are dealing with duality – good and bad, the virgin and the whore. In music, whether it’s by Peter Green or Eric Clapton, B.B. King or myself, we remind you that there’s another gear: compassion and gratitude. Those are gears on a truck or in our lives and very few people shift to those gears. That’s why I like playing music, man. I don’t like playing music for this or that. Anybody can do this or that. I like playing music because you can actually change the rhythm, or the psyche, or people’s lives. That’s a great responsibility.” That responsibility is powered by one of the most recognizable guitar voices in music. Carlos Santana’s guitar speaks with an authority the way James Earl Jones commanded his acting. That is to say, we buy what he is selling. And the result, as Eric Clapton has noted, is that “Carlos Santana can make you feel what he is feeling.” Yet he does not take this super power for granted. “I am really grateful that guitar players before me made a voice out of the guitar,” he explained. “Because before the guitar – was just background music. It was stomping chords, and then the trumpet, or the saxophone, or the singer would sing. Not until T-Bone Walker, or Charlie Christian, or Django Reinhardt did all of 38 DIGITAL EDITION AUG/SEPT