Classic Santana: Unretired and Reliably Inspired

When Santana released its career-retrospective triple-album “Viva Santana!” in 1988, with a corresponding tour, Carlos Santana promised that the Latin-jazz-rock fusion band would thereafter “call it a day, at least for a while.” Explained the guitarist at the time, “I don’t want to just crank out ‘Black Magic Woman’ and ‘Jingo’ in the future.”

Spoken like a true pop veteran, a la Sinatra or Bowie or Elton, and broken just like one too. A year and a half later, guess who’s back on tour. And what’s still being cranked out.

No one was heard objecting to this backtracking, of course, among the full house Friday night at the Greek Theatre (the first of three nights there for Santana), and there was not much reason to: The outfit’s nearly three-hour set is always reliably inspired from year to year--with even the oldest material sounding more fired up than cranked out--and the live blend of styles, whatever might be happening on the band’s albums, is usually scarcely subject to the shifting vagaries of new musical tastes.

As it happens, the current album, “Spirits Dancing in the Flesh,” while typically overproduced, adheres more closely to a classic Santana sound than some of the band’s compromised ‘80s LPs, and the set included the bulk of the album, with vocal numbers sung smoothly and solidly by Alex Ligertwood.

The funky remake of the Isleys’ “That Lady” (given a modern, black-dance beat and retitled “Who’s That Lady”) and the ballad treatment of Curtis Mayfield’s “Gypsy Woman” by no means count among the group’s more memorable moments but provided diverting enough pop turns amid the instrumental stretches that account for at least 75% of a Santana show.

New material aside, all that’s markedly different about Santana these days is that the hair is bundled into ponytails, keyboard player Chester Thompson does a little bit of sampling and the wacky weed smell among the crowd isn’t quite so choking. In many more ways a Santana concert still seems the quintessential ‘70s experience, preserved as carefully as a museum piece, complete with unabashed emphasis on mind expansion through soloing.

Really, though, it’s the quintessential ‘90s concert happening, at least for L.A., given our shifting demographics: Carlos Santana remains the foremost enduring music hero for rock-era Latinos, as well as a guitar hero for the masses, and the group’s local shows are as genuinely integrated an experience as it’s possible to have right now.