Santana signed to Polydor in 1991 after 22 years with Columbia Records. Their label debut has a somewhat elegiac tone, beginning with a stage introduction by the late promoter
Bill Graham and featuring an excerpt from a speech by
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., solos taken from
Miles Davis and
John Coltrane, and music written by
Bob Marley,
Coltrane, and
Gil Evans. Despite the presence of all these heroic ghosts, however,
Milagro is only an average
Santana release, familiar-sounding but undistinguished, and it failed to arrest the band's commercial slide, becoming the first new
Santana studio album not to crack the Top 100. ~ William Ruhlmann