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Santana: Smooth - AQACarlos Santana

Smooth was written by the award-winning Mexican-American guitarist and songwriter Carlos Santana, who founded the band Santana in 1966. Smooth was the most famous single from the album Supernatural and is a collaboration between Santana and singer Rob Thomas. It remains one of the biggest selling hits of all time.

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Carlos Santana

Born in 1947, Mexico, Carlos Santana is a Mexican-American musician who first rose to prominence in the early 1970s. His band Santana had a unique and distinctive sound that fused his guitar playing with and African-based rhythms, as well as influences from rock, , and blues. The music featured lots of percussion instruments such as and , which were not normally found in rock music at that time. He developed a highly distinctive sound characterised by long improvised solos, , and .

A photograph of Carlos Santana on stage performing with his guitar.
Image caption,
Carlos Santana performing live

Carlos Santana came from a musical background. His father was an orchestral violinist and a Mariachi - a performer of traditional Mexican music. Santana began playing the violin at the age of five before taking up the guitar at the age of eight. His family moved to Tijuana, a city on the Mexican and Californian border, before finally settling in San Francisco. During this time Santana was exposed to different musical cultures which influenced his own unique style of playing. He was influenced by blues players such as B.B. King, John Lee-Hooker, Jimi Hendrix, Peter Green, Mike Bloomfield and Hank Marvin.

Santana鈥檚 music grew less fashionable in the mid to late 1970s as the new genre punk rock began to dominate the music scene. The band had a revival in the late 1990s with the album Supernatural. It received nine Grammy awards and went 15 times platinum, selling over 25 million copies worldwide.