Alex Ligertwood passed away peacefully in his sleep at his longtime home in Santa Monica, just two weeks after performing his final concert — with his beloved dog Bobo by his side — and the music that he gave the world across five decades of performing, writing, and pouring everything he had into every song he ever stood in front of a microphone to sing is the kind that does not diminish with the passing of the person who made it but grows, somehow, more precious and more permanent with every hour that follows.

He was 79 years old and he was, by every account of everyone who ever shared a stage or a studio or an ordinary afternoon with him, exactly the kind of human being that the music always suggested — warm, genuine, completely committed, and possessed of a generosity of spirit that the people closest to him are describing in the days since his passing with the particular reverence reserved for people who made every room they entered feel better than it did before they arrived. Born in Drumchapel, Glasgow in 1946 into a musical family, Alex built a voice that eventually spanned nearly four octaves — a range that was less a technical achievement than a natural expression of someone who had been absorbing music since childhood, who had sung in school choirs and played in pipe bands and ridden the skiffle boom of the 1950s before the road took him through the Jeff Beck Group and Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express and eventually, inevitably, to the band where his voice found its fullest and most beloved expression. He served as Santana’s lead vocalist across five different stints between 1979 and 1994, bringing “Winning,” “Hold On,” and “All I Ever Wanted” to life in ways that became the definitive versions of those songs for an entire generation of listeners. His wife Shawn Brogan, who had known and loved him for thirty-six years, announced his passing with words that said everything: “Soar and sing with the angels, my love.”