Caravanserai Welcome Love Devotion Surrender Yoga Meditation Spiritual Home Decor Wall Art for Living Room & Bedroom

An essential to have in a Santana collection. Many great songs which give scope to Carlos Santana's extraordinary guitar playing. Sublime!This package gives any fan the chance to acquire three intriguing albums. The highly-regarded Caravanserai and the two that Carlos Santana made in collaboration with John McLaughlin."Caravanserai" is perfect jazz-latin fusion. It feels as if it owes a lot to Miles Davis and is rich, atmospheric and interesting. Reviews of the solo album will give you the flavour and, such is its fame, it hardly needs another puff from me. "Love, Devotion & Surrender" is a fine John Coltrane tribute album. It's quite reminiscent of the great Santana albums that preceded it but has its own unique character. The guts of it are two large (11/12 minutes+) tracks that are preceded and followed by rather lovely acoustic tracks ("Naima" and "Meditation"). The best of the big set pieces is "Let us go into the House of the Lord", which has great solos from Santana and a driving improvisatory feel to the jazz-latin-rock sound world. "The Life Divine" rather outstays its welcome but I still think that this album is much the more successful of the two Santana/McLaughlin collaborations. Another reviewer describes "Love, D & S" as a coaster, but for me it's the bland poppy "Welcome" that I can do without. Bizarrely, it's on this album that you will find the track "Love, Devotion and Surrender". Quite different in tone, I would describe it as soft-rock/soul-punk. Although rhythmically interesting in some pieces, virtually all the tracks seem bland and melodically feeble compared with their best work. The track "Mother Africa" starts promisingly with some African-influenced percussion but then chugs along, reminding me of the dwarves dancing around the Henge in "Spinal Tap". Once the phrase "Leprechauns in the Serengeti" had fixed itself in my mind, I just couldn't take it seriously. The preceding track, "Yours is the Light", makes you realise what's missing from the rest of the album. Here, finally, Carlos takes off with a characteristic free-wheeling guitar improvisation that caused me to give a sigh of relief.All three together make up a nicely varied trio from Santana's heyday but there is more padding than I care for. Caravanserai is superb and will be played often. I listened carefully to Love, Devotion and Surrender for this review and found it a positive pleasure. However, "Welcome" was a chore and although I might pick out "Samba da Sausalito" and "Yours is the Light", I can't see myself grinding through the whole album again. Following on the heels of such great albums, you can't help feeling a bit let down.Given the price of Caravanserai, you might be happy with that alone. Buy the trio if you're a completist who needs to make up their own mind; but only if you've already got the ground-breaking trio of albums that propelled Santana into pop mythology.Bought this used "very good" from a seller for less than$12.....A good deal for me as these are the remasters andwould have cost a lot more as individual purchases. I'mafraid that a lot of folks hopped off the Santana bandwagonat the point of "Caravanserai" and stayed off for years tofollow. I have fond memories of "Welcome" Xmas 1973 as thiswas released that November. The spiritual overtones seemed...how do I put this....'welcoming' at the time. The followingalbum had little for me and I pretty much ignored it. I willgive it a listen now that I own it as part of this X3 box set.The triple live LP "Lotus" came next (a gate-fold extravaganza)and then in October 1974 "Borboletta" was the much-maligned discthat I loved and always reminds me of Xmas 74. Funny thing how Imade the connection between Santana and the Holiday Season twoyears in a row......