Most underated albums......

Just my opinion, but "Welcome" is better than "Caravanserai". "Yours Is the Light" is my fav Santana guitar solo. My all-time fav Santana in the eponymous third album, the one with "Toussaint L'Overture". It's the first album with Neal Schon.

hummm, So what say you Viridian on Onhwy's vote here, verify?... never knew there was any other album with Shriev,Rolli,Schon, So welcome is better and yet the third "eponymous(?=meaning?) is even better??? Maybe, i'll try to locate something. BTW seems lots of good early 70's stuff is gone. Like Jethro Tull's Living In The Past is now "lost to the pas", especially with the horrible version of Living In The Past on the cd "Living With The Past"....Oh Well..hey that was a great Fleetwood Mac song with Peter Green himself on guitar. Anyone remember??

What is underrated? Some obscure band you heard and liked
but nobody else did? Or some band that was popular but the
album did not get airtime or nobody liked except you???
Everything in life might be "rated", but not necessarily rated the way you like. Why under or over rate everything? Why put things or ideas in a hierarchy? Just enjoy the things you like and forget about under or over anything!

To clarify, Santana's third album, titled "Santana", features the original band plus Neal Schon. "Welcome" features a completely different lineup (except for Jose Areas). The Santana/Rolie guitar/organ combo were great, but Carlos and Tom Coster click even better. "Welcome" also features Doug Rauch on bass. I'm not familiar with anything else he did, but he's a phenom on this album.

Since you're asking, I love "Welcome". The Organ playing is simply ethereal. But, to me, it doesn't comprise a whole the way that "Caravanserai" does. "Barboletto" falls somewhere in the middle. What makes Caravanserai unique is that it is the sound of a rock band of the greatest musical facility discovering jazz for the first time and looking backward to the traditions of jazz while looking foreward to hybrid jazz-rock forms. For my money Greg Rollie is the best keyboard player to have played with Santana and Shreve the best drummer. A quick look at "Soul Sacrifice" from the film "Woodstock" tells the whole story. I also believe that Cuban phenom Conga player Armando Pereza played on all of these albums in addition to Chepito Areas on timbales but memory may fail me. I really think that Edgar Winter's "Entance" that I recommended above falls into much the same magical category, and yet the two sound nothing alike.