JAKE COYLE
“Take no prisoners — peacefully,” Carlos Santana sometimes tells his bandmates before taking the stage.
“I don’t like to coast. I don’t like to rope-a-dope,” Santana says. “I want to get in the middle of the ring and knock the sucker out. That way the referee can’t steal the fight from me.”
Santana, 75, can still whip a crowd into a frenzy like few others. He’s been doing it since he stormed onto the San Francisco scene in the late ’60s. He left the Woodstock audience dazed and stunned before the first Santana record came out.
The new documentary by Rudy Valdez, “Carlos,” which is premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival and will be released this fall in theaters by Sony Pictures Classics, chronicles the meteoric rise of one of the most singular guitar players in rock history. The critic Robert Christgau once wrote: “He is less a
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