Cindy Blackman Santana, drummer for Lenny Kravitz and Carlos Santana, rocks The Carlyle Room in DC

WTOP’s Jason Fraley previews Cindy Blackman Santana at The Carlyle Room (Half 1)

It takes an actual powerhouse to play drums for rock icons like Lenny Kravitz and Carlos Santana.

“We now have pretty various originals and a few works by totally different people like Wayne Shorter that we’ve type of revamped, so that they sound barely fully totally different, which is sweet, we put a model new spin on them,” Blackman Santana suggested WTOP. “This band is so good, everybody’s acquired such big ears that the music is de facto able to take a wide range of journeys, twists and turns, so it retains the joys, it retains the facility and everyone has a extraordinarily good sound on their instrument.”

Born in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1959, Blackman grew up listening to an array of funk, jazz, classical and rock ‘n roll. When her family moved to Connecticut, she studied on the Hartt College of Music in Hartford and the Berklee Faculty of Music in Boston sooner than lastly dropping out to hold out with beloved doo-wop group The Drifters.

“That was cool because of it afforded me some stability, barely probability to make some cash … and easily do fixed gigs, although it wasn’t the music that I wanted to play, it was an experience, so that was good,” she talked about.

In 1993, after shifting to New York Metropolis, she acquired a cross-country title from Lenny Kravitz, who invited her to Los Angeles to audition for his music video for “Are You Gonna Go My Technique.” She would flip into his touring drummer for nearly 20 years, featured inside the dwell efficiency documentary “Alive from Planet Earth,” filmed reside in Australia.

“I met Lenny by a mutual pal [who] talked about, ‘I’ve acquired this pal Lenny Kravitz who’s been in the hunt for a drummer.’ … I discussed, ‘Who’s that?’ He talked about, ‘The person that was married to Lisa Bonet,’” she talked about. “I went available on the market and ended up auditioning, there have been like 40 drummers, I carried out second and after I carried out, Lenny often called off the auditions like, ‘No, I choose Cindy.’ … Seventeen years participating in on the road was pretty an amazing run.”

Whereas participating in with Kravitz at a music competitors in Germany in 2005, she met future husband Carlos Santana.

“I was with Lenny Kravitz and Santana was participating in, they carried out first,” Blackman Santana talked about. “I acquired a possibility to fulfill him, nonetheless there have been no sparks or one thing like that, I was [already romantically] involved and I think about he was involved as correctly. Fast forward 5 years later … he was attempting to find out what drummer to get to sub. … Carlos and I merely associated musically, then as we started talking, we really associated spiritually.”

He dramatically proposed to her on stage all through a dwell efficiency in Chicago on July 9, 2010.

“I was participating in ‘Corazón Espinado’ and I took a drum solo,” Blackman Santana talked about. “He often called me as a lot as the doorway of the stage and he begins talking. … It appeared like with out finish, then he merely checked out me and it was like a golden silence, it wasn’t a dead-zone silence, it was really golden because of the finest manner he was having a look at me. We’re in entrance of 20 to 30,000 people, then he merely talked about it, ‘Cindy, will you marry me?’ I was pretty floored, nonetheless I discussed, ‘Positive, fully.’”

Fourteen years later, the husband and partner musicians are nonetheless going sturdy.

“It’s really good to do what you are eager on best with the one who you are eager on,” she talked about. “We’re able to share one factor that is so divine. Music to me is like prayer, it’s the easiest kind of communication, because of it transcends and transverses any type of barrier whether or not or not it’s racial, political, cultural — it does not matter what it is, it transcends that. So I like music and to have the power to share that with Carlos is just the ultimate phrase journey, the ultimate phrase pleasure, the ultimate phrase journey.”

WTOP’s Jason Fraley previews Cindy Blackman Santana at The Carlyle Room (Half 2)

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