“He was a very untraditional player, even though he had learned the traditional approach to blues to start with”: Carlos Santana on what made Jeff Beck a guitar great, and why he had to get into character to cover Michael Jackson

(Image credit: Richard E. Aaron/Redferns; Koh Hasebe/Shinko Music/Getty Images)

Carlos Santana certainly qualifies as a guitar hero - Prince once suggested that he was more of an influence on his playing than Jimi Hendrix - but he’s happy to acknowledge the debt he owes to the musicians that inspired him.

Take Jeff Beck, for example, a friend and occasional collaborator (he played with Beck and Steve Lukather on the Nagano Session, back in 1986).

“Jeff Beck took guitar way beyond,” Santana says in a new interview with Guitar World. “His approach was like letting the hamster out of the cage.”

Explaining what made Beck so special, Santana adds: “I was a big fan of Jeff from the second I heard him play. What I loved most was his imagination and passion. He was a very untraditional player, even though he had learned the traditional approach to blues to start with.”

Santana says that the first time he heard Beck was on Over Under Sideways Down, a 1966 song by the Yardbirds.

“He had this fuzz sound that was very special,” he remembers. “You could also tell he’d been listening to people like Ravi Shankar or Ali Akbar Khan. He was a multi-dimensional player in that sense - the opposite of a one-trick pony.”

So what, if anything, did Santana learn from Beck? “Like Jeff, I learned how to take a deep breath and trust my fingers almost like a child going down a water slide,” he says.

Santana | Stranger In Moscow | Visualizer - YouTube

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Santana’s latest album, Sentient, was released in March, and includes a live cover of Michael Jackson’s Stranger in Moscow, which featured on his 1995 album, HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I. Here, Santana plays MJ’s vocal melody on his guitar, and he says that he almost had to go into character to nail the performance.

“When I’m playing Stranger in Moscow, you’re hearing a different Carlos, because I’m thinking of Michael Jackson and phrasing everything differently - even if it’s still got my own fingerprint,” says Santana.

You can check out the full interview in the new issue of Guitar World.