AUSTIN, TX | It was 105 degrees on the walk to the Moody Center, and when I got back to my car hours later, it was still 100 degrees inside. None of that mattered. People were already gathered outside in the sun, waiting on one thing: a legend was about to take the stage.
Carlos Santana has been part of my musical life since I was nine years old. My older sister’s record collection was my library, and one day she came home with Abraxas. What came out of those speakers was unlike anything I’d heard. I grew up on a dairy farm northwest of Houston, and “Black Magic Woman” and “Oye Como Va” felt like a bridge to somewhere else—other people, other places, another way of experiencing the world. I wanted to go there.
So, walking into the pit for the Austin stop of Santana’s Oneness Tour 2026 was more than a shoot. It was a chance to stand in front of someone who has given as much to humanitarian work as to music. Through the Milagro Foundation, he has backed arts, education, and health programs for underserved kids since 1998—respect to you, Mr. Santana.
The first thing I saw when the lights came up was Santana himself, and it was almost dreamlike. The second thing I noticed was the drummer. And holy hell, could she play. I didn’t realize until the next day that she was Cindy Blackman Santana, his wife. Packing up later, I overheard a young guy telling his friends what a badass the drummer was. He was right.
The set opened with “Soul Sacrifice” and “Jingo,” both from the 1969 debut Santana, the album that also gave us the Top 10 hit “Evil Ways.” I’d never heard “Jingo” live before, and I loved it. After we finished shooting, I was climbing the stairs in the dark when “Black Magic Woman” started. I couldn’t turn around. I couldn’t stop and dance. There is something almost somber about walking away from a stage while the music is still playing.
What struck me most, once I could stop shooting and just watch, was the crowd. Crowds can be loud, restless, chaotic—sometimes all at once. This one looked entranced—people danced, but there was reverence in it. Behind the band, Woodstock footage moved across the screens. You weren’t watching a concert. You were watching musical history unfold in real time.
Then Jimmie Vaughan, one of Texas’s own, joined the band for a blues shuffle, and the room came apart. Between songs, Santana spoke about love, peace, and unity, the themes he has carried for nearly sixty years, and hearing them in a room of thousands landed harder than I expected.
The heat outside was brutal. Inside the Moody Center, there was another kind—the kind that comes from music that has survived decades and can still stop thousands of people in their tracks. For one night in Austin, I was lucky enough to be there.
