Where’s Carlos? He’s in that room.So my parents and I, we knock on the door, and he’s, Oh, you’re the kid I heard about do you want to play tonight?: How a 9-year-old guitar prodigy ended up jamming with Carlos Santana [Video]

In a new interview with Broken Records podcast, jazz guitarist Julian Lage tells the story of how, at the age of nine, he ended up jamming with Carlos Santana in front of an audience of 20,000.

It happened in 1997, when Santana was touring the US with another guitar legend, Jeff Beck. The young Julian joined Carlos on stage for a performance of the Funkadelic classic Maggot Brain.

As Julian now recalls, his connection with Carlos began with a chance encounter.

“My father worked at Fog City diner in San Francisco,” he says, “and someone came in who he was friends with and he said, ‘I know Santana and I heard your son’s playing guitar.’ My dad said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Well, Santana’s playing at [a San Francisco venue] in two weeks. You should just show up. Usually they get there by 2pm.’

“That’s all the information we had. So …