Is this revisionism, or what? When Love Devotion Surrender was originally released in 1973, Carlos Santana and Mahavishnu John McLaughlin were equally billed; now, the disc is entirely under the Santana rubric. It goes to show who's sold a ton of records late in his career!

McLaughlin was the true inventor of jazz-rock fusion (and the driving force behind Miles's conversion to the form). Here he meets the ambitious inventor of Latin hard rock, who early in his career was anxious to move beyond the world he'd conquered. You wonder if they could have done better than this disc, which features a bunch of tepid Coltrane covers (for your own health and safety, don't even bother comparing them to the originals). The guitar maestros' approach is to have the name of the song chanted while they noodle in the background for the bulk of the disc. A tip of the hat to McLaughlin – at that point he could have made mincemeat of the less nimble and versatile Santana. But in 2003 the open-ended jams (especially those drenched in reverb, with a lot of rapid, right-hand picking) sound more than just dated or quaint; in fact, they're downright annoying. On the bright side, the photograph on the cover of Santana and McLaughlin with their guru (Sri Chimnoy) is part of the package, and it's priceless. The teacher looks like a diminutive wrestling coach or upscale yoga teacher, and his two disciples seem positively out of place. A more apt visual metaphor for the pairing (or triumvirate, really) would have been impossible to conceive.