Any Carlos Santana biography that you read shows that he has had a clear love for music since he was a small child. He was five years old when he learned the violin from his dad who was a professional Mariachi violinist. Santana was part of a typical large Hispanic family made up of his parents, José Santana and Josefina Barrangán, and six children: Antonio, Laura, Irma, Leticia, Jorge and María.
Santana ended up in Tijuana after his family moved from his native Autlán de Navarro in Jalisco, Mexico. He began playing at clubs and bars with various bands on the Tijuana strip. At the age of eight he decided to trade the violin for the guitar after listening to blues and rock & roll on the radio. He never looked back.
Any Carlos Santana biography tells you that 40 years ago this man, who comes from at least three generations of musicians, took the world by storm with his distinct sound. In an Eye On The Bay interview in 2005, Carlos Santana confessed: “I just knew exactly what I wanted to be, how I wanted to do it.” He also attributes all he knows to his father and to picking up blues records. He studied and emulated the sounds of John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, T. Bone Walker and others.
"Music, more than almost anything else, has the power to bring people together-people of different ages, races, religions. So I'm more clear now as to why I play. It's not just to make people happy or to make them dance-it's to change things: change myself, change the people in my band, change people all over the world, so we can have a clearer vision about life and about ourselves, so we can bring more harmony to the world."..........Carlos Santana.
