Show features Carlos Santana: loving son, mariachi violinist

Most people walking into a museum of popular music expect to see guitars. Maybe a drum set.

But in an exhibit about Latino music, it was critical to showcase accordions, the trombone and the 12-string guitar known as the bajo sexto, says Jasen Emmons, EMP's director of curatorial affairs.

Also featured in the new "American Sabor" exhibit: a violin purchased by Carlos Santana for his father José.

The gesture was significant on many different levels.

José Santana supported his family in Jalisco, Mexico, by playing the violin in a mariachi band. And it was José, Carlos Santana told Emmons recently, who "infected" him with music. "Because I saw his eyes when I was 5 years old ... and I saw how the people were looking at him," Carlos Santana recalled. "And right there and then I knew that that's all I ever wanted to do and be, is be adored the way people adore my father in this little town and then later on in Tijuana."

Carlos Santana was a youngster when he joined his father's band, also playing the violin. But in an interview he gave to Emmons, Santana talks about how he never really liked the instrument. Its smell. Its feel. Nor did he like playing where the band had its gigs: in some pretty filthy bars. Eventually the younger Santana shared his feelings with his father, who didn't take it well.

"I wasn't born to be a Mexican musician," Carlos Santana told Emmons. "I was born to be a multidimensional, inter, interdenominational musician who would not have any boundaries ... I'm one of the few. I'm one of the few, like Bob Marley, who has a universal tone."

Santana was still a kid when he eventually immigrated to San Francisco and fell in love with the blues and, most important for all of us, the guitar. His father, in fact, bought him his first guitar.

Carlos Santana bought the violin for his father in 1980, more than a decade after his breakthrough performance at Woodstock hurtled his band to double-platinum success. His father died in 1997.

A recorded interview with Carlos Santana and a photo showing the youngster playing alongside his father are included in the museum exhibit.

Florangela Davila, Seattle Times staff reporter