SANTANA PLAYS THE RACE CARD, after the death of legendary jazz drummer Elvin Jones last month, in an article in the San Diego Union Tribune:

A hippie at heart, Carlos Santana has long championed music as a potent force for creating positive vibrations that – as this veteran of the 1969 Woodstock festival puts it – "can change your molecular structure."

But the legendary rocker sounded uncharacteristically angry during a discussion about the recent death of one of his musical heroes, jazz drum icon Elvin Jones, who died May 18 of heart failure.

Santana, who will be honored in Los Angeles as the 2004 Latin Recording Academy Person of the Year on Aug. 30, is incensed that Jones' death elicited scant media coverage. He expressed his frustration during a recent interview from his San Rafael office.

"I'm really embarrassed for this nation, and for MTV and VH1 and Rolling Stone, because it was a very racist thing not to acknowledge this most important musician when he passed," said Santana, whose 1999 album, "Supernatural," won nine Grammys and has sold more than 25 million copies.

"For them to (play up) Ozzy Osbourne and other corny-ass white people, but not Elvin, is demeaning and I'm really embarrassed to live in this country."

* * * The reason for the slight, Santana believes, is a matter of racial and cultural prejudice.

"When Miles (Davis) died (in 1991), for four hours in France they stopped everything on TV and radio – all the regular programming – and just showed Miles for four hours, all through France," Santana recalled. "Here in the U.S., it's embarrassing (how jazz is treated). People should be ashamed of themselves."

There's a very simple answer to this: put your money where your mouth is, Carlos--create a jazz TV channel for cable. If Al Gore can convince a group of investors to buy a Canadian TV channel to create Al-TV, there's no reason why Santana can't try to do something similar.

But will there be enough of an audience for advertising revenues? Because as Air America on the radio is showing, if nobody tunes in, it won't stay on for too long. VH-1 showed jazz every Sunday night in the mid to late 1980s. Jazz musician Ben Sidran was the host, and I used to watch it each week. But apparently, nobody else did, because it was eventually cancelled.

There's a great book from the late 1990s called If It Ain't Got That Swing: The Rebirth of Grown-Up Culture by Mark Gauvreau Judge. Judge argues that rock and roll took off in the mid-1950s largely because jazz musicians and their critics abandoned the popular swing bands for the much more insular bebop and cool jazz, which made the musicians and critics happy, but alienated mass audiences, who wanted simple music they can dance to. When Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Elvis came along offering them just that, guess where the audiences went?

And Santana knows this--there's a reason why his latest record sold 50 bazillion copies: because it had simple songs with popular young singers on them, rather than Coltrane-style modal jams.

So Carlos is filling sports arenas playing rock, but surprised that nobody's buying jazz records.

Go figure.

Incidentally, has anybody asked Santana what he thinks of the outpouring of emotion that Ray Charles received when he died? Or does that not count because Ray sold out and played popular music to the masses, rather than jazz.

...You know, like Santana.