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Rating: With a questionable strategic choice, Santana's record label, instead of organizing a live album of the aforementioned group which was very popular at that time (1972), preferred to invest in this impromptu collaboration between the Chicano guitarist and the burly Miles, a black drummer with strong and boastful ambitions as a frontman.
In reality, on stage (in Hawaii, inside a crater! One of the few dormant ones around there, eh eh...) there's a battalion of people: two other members of Santana (second guitar and conga), then another drummer because Miles has to howl at the microphone, then the bass, three additional percussionists(!), sax, trumpet, organist. There are twelve of them giving it their all!
So: in the case of these rustic and straightforward live albums, without overdubbing and corrections, accompanied by minutes and minutes of jam sessions on a single chord that, if you're not there in the front rows taking the music in the face and maybe passing some joints around, it's hard to enjoy, there are enthusiasts who get involved and get excited; conversely, there are those who avoid them because the musical menu is haphazard, and there's always someone on stage trying to show off and drag things out indefinitely. In my personal experience, the lengthiness and exaggerations work when you're there in person, not when you're listening to the album in the car or even sitting in an armchair. So, I always oscillate between the two moods, depending on the day... the album is nothing to miss, but the naïve and vintage atmosphere can certainly make it worth a listen.
The setlist includes only one Santana track, “Evil Ways,” their first single from the debut album of 1969, sung here by Carlos. The opening is instead "Marbles" (marbles... it's always funny to note the fantasy with which instrumentals are often and willingly titled...), a great piece by John McLaughlin, from the album “Devotion” a couple of years earlier. It boasts a bass/guitar riff as simple as it is intriguing, hypnotic, compelling: it's the best moment of the album.
The narcissist Miles also assaults us here with his hit "Them Changes," which had already showcased itself a few years earlier in Jimi Hendrix's album with the Band of Gypsys, of which Miles was a drummer. Amen, after Jimi, Carlos and Neal Schon, and the others are instructed by Buddy and diligently perform our funky soul.
As already happened in "Band of Gypsys" with Jimi and even more so in this case with Carlos, the concert is marred by the continuous, interminable warbles of Miles, who squawks all the time, alternating screams and vocal flights, together with the usual "You Feel Allright?", "Everybody!," "Clap Your Hands!" etcetera. You want to shoot him! But people seem to enjoy it, they applaud and get excited.
The first side of the LP is all here, apart from two brief interludes called "Lava" (an unwise invocation, given the site!) and "Faith Interlude." The second side, or the last track of the CD, instead, is entirely occupied by the infamous giant jam session earlier slandered, called "Free Form Funkafide Filth": over twenty-four minutes of improvisations, groove, and solos on a single chord, maybe two at a certain point.
The scent of rock still in its adolescent phase is all there, the musical consistency much less in this work that shows on the cover, tinted in a "lava-like" color, the beautiful profile of young Santana with his volitional goatee and thick hair styled with fireworks. In a couple of years from there he will instead go around dressed in white from head to toe, with hair and a mustache like a Tijuana souvenir shopkeeper and in the company of his Indian guru, oh well. More attractive is the “acid” Carlos of these recordings.
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