|
|
Music CD - Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin: Love Devotion Surrender
|
Music CD: Love Devotion Surrender
Artist: Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin
List Price: $6.99
Our Price: $2.93
Your Save: $ 4.06 ( 58% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Sbme Special Mkts.
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Tracks:
|
1. Love Supreme
2. Naima
3. Life Divine
4. Let Us Go into the House of the Lord
5. Meditation
|
|
|
Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0886972383125
Label: Sbme Special Mkts.
Manufacturer: Sbme Special Mkts.
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Sbme Special Mkts.
Release Date: 2008-02-01
Studio: Sbme Special Mkts.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating: 
Summary: sublime beyond belief
Comment: This cd contains some of the most inspiring and electrifying music I have ever heard. Let Us Go into the House of the Lord is absolute perfection and is alone worth the price. It's beautiful, moving, and engenders a wonderful optimism. It's by far the single tune I've listened to most over the past three years or so. The Life Devine and Love Supreme are stellar as well. I like the bonus Love Supreme track better than the original. I give the cd only 4 stars as it's slightly uneven. Naima is quite ordinary (sorry Coltrane) and Mediation is very nice but somehow out of place. If you like this stuff, check out Flame-Sky on Santana's Welcome too, on which Johnny Mac appears. Also, the excellent Promise of a Fisherman on Santana's Barboletta is clearly influenced by these sessions.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Into the mystic
Comment: My college roomate played this for me in 1974 and I was instantly converted. The music and total package of the original album would just send me to some unknown quarter. Yes,
I worship at the altar of Love, Devotion, & Surrender. Roll your eyes and call me a cult member or whatever, I don't care. All I know and feel is that this is great music by great musicians.
And I'm no Sri Chinmoy devotee either. You have to marvel how such beautiful sounds can appear in a world filled with violence and hate. Definitely not for the casual listener.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A BEAUTIFUL, IF BRIEF, EXPERIMENT
Comment: This is one of the first albums I bought in my first tenative explorations of jazz. I was none to please with it either. For the most part, I was unhappy with the dense cacophony of notes. I was, as I remember, quite drawn to "Naima".
Now, some thirty years later, my perspective has changed. What appeared to me to be a grab bag of notes thrown in and given a song title are now quite logical and expressive "conversations" among gifted musicians. It also is more "rock" oriented than I perceived it to be thirty years ago. Such is my taste after all these long years in the "school of jazz".
Still, we have to address that album in context and why it got such a bad rap at the time. Jazz purists hated it precisely because of its "rock" structures. As with all "fusion", jazz heads hated and rejected all that Miles Davis hath wrought in his quest to update and incorporate new sounds into the jazz vocabulary. Miles and his disciples (and would-be disciples) were very much seen as the bratty, trust fund, rich boys who were lost in dissipation and squandering the wealth their forefathers built up over the years.
The "rock" standpoint was more complicated. As any brief survey of rock music in the first half of the 1970's shows, most jazz-rock had very little appeal to those coming of age at the time. If you popped the cork out of the bottle and took enough drinks, the unkind assessment that jazz musicians were desperately trying to increase dwindling record sales and live gigs by bastardizing rock and roll would rise to the surface. There was also anger that one of the freshest and most promising "sounds" to come out of the late 1960's was being lost. Carlos Santana's flirtation with jazz was seen as devastating to his talent and "voice".
But more than all the above, the pictures of Carlos Santana standing next to his guru and John McLaughlin-dressed in white, chastised of his long locks of hair, so rigid and anxious like a little boy who had been taken to the wood shed-tapped a generational primal fear. Santana has this pitiful look on his face as if to say "No, don't spank me anymore. I promise to be good. Really, I will." This photograph communicated everything us pagan baby-boomers feared so much in religious conversions among our contemporaries. Whether those conversions were Christian or one of a myriad of Eastern religions, the transformation of independent and freedom loving individuals into constrained and "soul-less" beings terrified us. In spite of the fact that these new converts testified to new freedom and peace, at bottom we were certain it was not true. Baby boomers loved to talk about how "spiritual" they were; but actually conforming to a discipline went against the gospel of freedom. After all, in the common folklore of my generation, why would you break free of the stifling prison of our parents' suburban lifestyle only to enter another prison of religious hypocrisy? (We were certain all those religiously observant were hypocrites underneath: every Billy Graham was secretly an Elmer Gantry.) Whatever kisses we placed on the altar of pluralism, we were certain that "authentic" people would be just like us.
The passing of the years has not been kind to our youthful idealism. Life's adventures and misadventures has generally led us to look more kindly on those who did not insist on "total authenticity". Still, even after all these years, the pictures on the album cover continue to make me uncomfortable. Santana himself has moved on and has gone under several transformations. The fact that Santana has gone through several lead singers-never taking on that chore himself-has tended to obscure his image and push him off the popular radar screen. In terms of instrumental magic, everything he has done since 1973's CARAVANSERAI simply pales. Indeed, CARAVANSERAI is a much better album than LOVE DEVOTION SURRENDER. Spiritual considerations aside, Santana did not need John McLaughlin to garner legitimacy for himself.
But taken on its own terms, LOVE DEVOTION SURRENDER is a love letter to John Coltrane and Miles Davis-not just as musicians but a kind of spiritual acolytes to the sacred beyond. What appeared to me a confused jumble of notes now sounds like baskets of joy offered one after the other. "A Love Supreme" rings with the proclamation of divine faithfulness. It is not as sublime as Coltrane's original; but the interplay between the two guitarists makes it more intense. "Naimi" remains the quiet and gentle thing it is-but it does not grab me as much now as it did thirty years ago. (Much the same thing can be said for the album ender "Mediation".)
"The Life Divine" just falls flat for me. It did thirty years ago and now-with my more educated ears-it still does. I don't know whether it was the "moment" or the actual structure of the piece, but it just doesn't "build".
The real centerpiece of the album is the fifteen minute "Let Us Go Into The House Of The Lord". Based on the same-named Christian hymn, Santana and McLaughlin appeal to images in the Western imagination to mirror an Eastern dissolve into blessedness. The old hymn was based on Psalm 122 and calls forth a double meaning of entering the Lord's house here on earth and being received into God's heavenly house in the "days to come". Some may feel it is overly long, but its length is not unusual for either jazz or rock. Many of us dread worship services of any kind due to the tedious "Mickey Mouse" modern liturgists are sure we demand. But as the ancients knew, it is in the lifting up and offering of praise that God gives Himself to those who love Him. Whether you believe this or not, Santana and McLaughlin clearly do. This is a sweet ride that goes from simple statements to almost ecstatic exchange at the end. You may prefer the more earthy (and shorter) Clapton guitar solo on Cream's version of "Crossroads"; but the delight the listener experiences is undeniable.
In the end, no matter how "rocky" this album is in basic musical structure, this CD will appeal mostly to jazz fans who have a particular taste for the "fusion" period of the 1970's. This is not everyone's cup of tea. If you're a rock fan whose taste settles in Led Zeppelin -or James Taylor for that matter-this is not the place to expand your horizons. Even if you like Paul Simon's "cocktail jazz" stuff, this is still not your bag. And don't think if you are especially "spiritual" in your soul this is for you. But to those few can appreciate that brief window when jazz was learning a new vocabulary for itself ("rock" that is-"funk" is a different story altogether) this is a beautiful if short experiment.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nothing exceptional
Comment: A good album by Carlos and John (fellow Chinmoy followers at the time). The problem with the album is it is directionless and realy lacks the melody or the explosiveness of the other projects by these two at the time.
If you wan't a mellower jazzy feel to this claboration go for 'Welcome' by Santana with John which BTW has an excellent track titiled 'Love Devotion and Surrender'. Welcome is a far superior album with great tunes and classic fussion in 'Flame sky' where the guitar duel between Carlos and John is yet to be surpassed.
If you like the fast and fussion side of the musicians then as a lot of the other reviewers have said go for 'Inner Mounting Flame' with The Mahavishnu Orchestra.
All in all this one was slightly disappointing for me as I was hoping it would be similar to 'Welcome'.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Guitar Bliss
Comment: Buy it!
If you are a guitar student or an expert ...see the two finest guitar players of the 1970's and maybe all time reach "Nirvana"
This is the guitar album to own!
Listen to the tone of Carlos and Johnny Mac it is unbelievable!
I strongly suggest purchase of this cd as well as Mahavishnu's " Inner Mounting Flame " own these two cd's and you will attend the finest guitar university known to man!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
