Lotus

This triple live LP, recorded on the Caravanserai tour in 1973 and only available in Japan at first, didn’t really get its due until the 1990s, when it was finally reissued on CD. This was Santana at their jazz-rock peak, a two-hour slab of hard-as-hell Latin fusion with only two tracks — perfunctory runs through “Black Magic Woman” and “Oye Como Va” — featuring vocals. Several other pieces, including “A-1 Funk,” “Free Angela,” a version of Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira’s “Xi-ba-ba,” and “Castillos de Arena,” written by Chick Corea and arranged by the Santana band, are entirely new. The band performs at unearthly peaks of intensity throughout; this album sits alongside Miles Davis’s Agharta, the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Between Nothingness and Eternity and King Crimson’s USA as an example of just how far out you could go in the early ’70s.