- Source of Wealth: Music
- Age: 72
- Birth Place: Autlán de Navarro, Jalisco, México
- Marital Status: Married (Cindy Blackman)
- Full Name: Carlos Alberto Santana Barragán
- Nationality: Mexican-American
- Date of Birth: July 20, 1947
- Ethnicity: Mexican
- Occupation: Musician
- Education: Mission High School
- Children: 3 (Salvador, Angelica, Stella)
Born in Mexico, songwriter and guitarist Carlos Santana has won 10 Grammy Awards and 3 Latin Grammy Awards. He popularized the latin-fusion sound, a mixture of rock, salsa, and jazz in the late 60’s and 70’s with his band, Santana. He has released seven studio albums as a solo artist and twenty-one albums with his band.
Santana is the primary exponent of Latin-tinged rock, particularly due to its combination of Latin percussion (congas, timbales, etc.) with bandleader Carlos Santana’s distinctive, high-pitched lead guitar playing. The group was the last major act to emerge from the psychedelic San Francisco music scene of the 1960s and it enjoyed massive success at the end of the decade and into the early ’70s. The musical direction then changed to a more contemplative and jazzy style as the band’s early personnel gradually departed, leaving the name in the hands of Carlos Santana, who guided the group to consistent commercial success over the next quarter-century. By the mid-’90s, Santana seemed spent as a commercial force on records, though the group continued to attract audiences for its concerts worldwide. But the band made a surprising and monumental comeback in 1999 with Supernatural, an album featuring many guest stars that became Santana’s best-selling release and won a raft of Grammy Awards.
Mexican-native Carlos Santana (born July 20, 1947, in Autlan de Navarro, Mexico) moved to San Francisco in the early ’60s, by which time he was already playing the guitar professionally. In 1966, he formed the Santana Blues Band with keyboard player and singer Gregg Rolie (born June 17, 1947, in Seattle, WA) and other musicians, the personnel changing frequently. The group was given its name due to a musicians union requirement that a single person be named a band’s leader and it did not at first indicate that Carlos was in charge.