In the 1990s I was involved in several projects with Latin rock/pop producer KC Porter. He helped me get my start in LA, including my first recording session, playing guitar on one of the last tracks featuring Selena before she died. It was in KC’s studio that I got my first real taste of the record-making process… he used to leave me in there for days at a time, experimenting with different microphones, effects, samplers etc; and committing all my work to tape (yes… tape). We wrote quite a few songs together over the years as well.

But nothing could have prepared me for the phone call when KC said “Hey JB, I have some cool news. I’m going to be meeting with Carlos Santana and his manager about doing some tracks for an upcoming record, and I thought you might want to come along and check it out.”

The nonchalance of his tone was obviously tongue-in-cheek; KC knew that I lived and breathed Santana’s music since I was 16 years old, and we had spoken many times about Carlos’ influence on my artistic journey over the years and what it had meant to me to be onstage with him a few times with WAR. It was really Carlos who made me into the world rhythm junkie that I remain to this day… and as a guitarist, suffice it to say that I used to have to consciously try not to play like him every time I took a solo.

“Gee, let me think about it. Yeah, I think I’m free today.” I got to the studio in record time.

When I got to the meeting, the manager was ready to run interference, but Carlos recognized me from the WAR days and welcomed me in. KC let everyone know that I was there so we could collaborate on something true to the spirit of Santana’s music. Carlos proceeded to roll out a bunch of big paintings on the floor of the studio… paintings full of intense color and dancing shapes, somewhere between African folk art and ’60s psychedelia. He said to us, “Can you make music that sounds like this?”

This basically set the tone for every encounter we had with Carlos. Watching Baraka at his house, listening to Fela Kuti records and watching rare footage of Miles and Wayne Shorter, we spent as much time as we could submerged in Santana-land. KC and I went into the studio and created a huge variety of music for Carlos to play on, all the way from covers of Bob Marley and John Coltrane to some songs we wrote expressly for the project, particularly the very Santana-esque guajira/soul track Primavera. The lyric used metaphors from the Bahá’í Writings about a spiritual springtime transforming the world, and the groove was a half-time funk, nicely executed by drummer James Keegan and bassist Mike Porcaro. When Carlos came in to record on the track, he tore into it like it was the last solo he would ever play. He was a force of nature.

There were many other highlights from those days… Santana swept the Grammys and sold approximately a gazillion copies of Supernatural, KC and I sang Primavera with him at the Greek Theater, I got to play Carlos’ #1 guitar one time while he jammed along – on drums. But the big highlight for me was recording another song for his next record, an Afrobeat song called One Of These Days, with Ozomatli playing on it and little ol’ me on lead vocals. There were a lot of cool things about that song: it was a tribute to Fela Kuti, it had positive, politically charged lyrics during the post-9/11 madness, and Carlos played beautiful melodic themes all over it that echo in your head after the song is over. It was also the last collaboration I would have with my good friend and longtime engineer Jeff Poe, who died a few years later.

The cherry on top was performing the song live at the Hollywood Bowl, with Santana and Ozomatli onstage, and in the audience my whole family, many close friends and my ex-boss, Lonnie Jordan of WAR. That night, Carlos took me aside and told me it was time for me to step out and make my own music. That’s a whole other story, and a long one that’s still ongoing, but it really meant a lot coming from the man whose music had been the soundtrack to my life for over 20 years. He’s an amazing person; there’s no one else like him, and I look forward to more opportunities to experience music and life with him in the future. To this day, KC and I are constantly cooking up ways to offer him something musically that reflects the influence he’s had on us. We’ll nail it… ‘one of these days…’

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