Santana

“Santana IV”

(Santana IV)

On “Santana IV,” Carlos Santana is reunited with the core musicians from the band’s first three albums, restoring the team concept to a name more immediately associated with his solo career since the mega-success of 1999’s “Supernatural” and its dizzying array of guest stars.

The return of guitarist Neil Schon and keyboard wiz Gregg Rolie who left in 1973 to form Journey, along with drummer Mike Shrieve and conguero Mike Carabello, gives Santana the band a natural dynamic and the album a familiar, if overlong flow.

Recorded over two years, “Santana IV” is notable for the guitar duets and duels between Santana and Schon, getting into a Peter Green vibe on “Shake It,” working up a Phil Lynott-Gary Moore groove on the burning “Blues Magic” and doing tag-team solos on “Echizo,” a fire-breathing scorcher that ends too soon and deserves an extended version.

Adaptations of the band’s hits like “Oye Como Va” (here called “Anywhere You Want To Go”) and “Evil Ways” (now “Leave Me Alone”), two tracks with guest vocalist Ronald Isley and plenty of Latin rhythms provide boosts. An outside producer-editor could have lent freshness to avoid some stilted, programmed percussion, “Hey baby, sit on my lap” lyrics and a few songs too many. (AP)





Ben Harper reunited with Innocent Criminals for new songs



Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals

“Call It What It Is”

(Stax Records)



Ben Harper is back with the best band he’s ever sung with, delivering strong new material with a group that has always known when to play hard and when to hang back.

Coming on the heels of a 2015 tour with the Innocent Criminals, Harper and the band have recorded 11 new songs that stay true to their eclectic past. They’ve done so on Stax Records, which isn’t the same outfit it was in its Memphis heyday, when Otis Redding, Booker T and the M.G.’s and Isaac Hayes were breaking barriers of both genre and quality.

Harper’s new songs don’t attain those stratospheric levels of achievement, but he and the band don’t dishonor the legacy as they range comfortably from political diatribes to love songs to forceful rock and roll.

The title cut, “Call It What It Is,” takes an angry swing at the spate of recent shootings of young black men, and if the message isn’t wildly original -- it’s still murder, that’s the point -- Harper delivers it with plenty of feeling.

The common thread throughout the album is Harper’s voice, one of the most versatile and sensitive of the last three decades. It has always been what sets his work apart. (AP)