Gabor Szabo, Mizrab

I love records but I am not much of an audiophile. I have never been particularly into the newest or best stereo equipment – good enough is fine for me.  I don’t think I have ever spent time in bars exclaiming how vinyl sounds so much better than CDs/cassettes/streaming/whatever. Plus, I’d rather listen to Miles Davis coming out of a tin can than Dream Theater coming out of God’s phonograph.

That said, I am sometimes blown away by the direct to my ear just-rightness that happens when a needle hits the right record.

This happened recently when I found a pristine copy of Gabor Szabo’s Mizrab for a couple of bucks down at my local record store.

I slapped Mizrab down on a cheap, but oh so sweet, portable record player in the kitchen and the music coming out from speakers was so deep and the space between the instruments was so defined that it felt like I could see the different spots the musicians were at in the studio. There is something about records that can really capture a musician or a group when they together live in the studio.

Mizrab is on CTI, was produced by Creed Taylor, and engineered by Rudy Van Gelder. You can get a short history of Taylor starting Impulse! here and CTI here.

CTI recordings are either super tasty, cheesy in a supremely Huggy Bear 1970s fun way, or deliciously, sublimely, tasty and cheesy all at the same time. CTI gets a bad rap with jazz fans for crossing over too much but when you actually sit down and listen to their recordings there are just so many good platters (and often adventurous post-bop ones) that came out on the label.

Gabor Szabo was an amazing guitarist but I figured that Mizrab could go either way. This says more about the settings Szabo could be placed in rather than his playing, which was always excellent. Most of his Impulse recordings with Taylor are the grooviest things you’ve ever heard but a couple of his releases for that label sound like they were made to be played during the lunch rush at a Waffle house circa 1968. That said, its kind of fun to hear 1960s acid rock turned into Bela Lugosi accented EZ listening with a faceless Up With People style chorus popping up — it serves as a warning that the town of Stepford is fast approaching.

Being a guitarist probably helped Gabor Szabo make it as a popular jazz artist during the rock star 1960s.  The guitarist had a hypnotic playing style that incorporated Western and Eastern influences and he had deserved success taking pop hits and putting trippy, fantastical stories into them.  Check out the slinky, down home funkiness Szabo and Lena Horne bring to Macca’s “Rocky Raccoon” — I would have guessed that Lena Horne + Szabo + The Beatles would = a car crash but it is awesome — and fun for the whole family. On top of his interpretative abilities, the guitarist wrote strong original tunes, as you can hear on Mizrab.

Gabor Szabo had an individualistic style, bringing his own Hungarian (and Gypsy) heritage, and an Indian folk influence, to American jazz for a completely new sound. Stopping to think about it, what Szabo did was not really dissimilar to what Django did for guitar playing a generation earlier. A love affair with American jazz combined with deep respect for their own musical heritage created new, popular sounds.  Not coincidentally, each came up with their own fingering system on the strings, Django out of necessity after a crippling injury while Szabo did it out of initial ignorance — he was completely self-taught. His self-education must have been pretty thorough because, after relocating to America, Szabo ended up attending Boston’s Berklee School of Music for formal training in music theory. As a side note, the name Gabor Szabo may have looked odd on American album covers during the 1960s and ’70s but its a surprisingly common name in Hungary — like John Smith here, or the UK, though translated directly Gabor Szabo would be Gabriel Taylor.

Reading a book on Impulse I was surprised to learn that Gabor Szabo and his old boss Chico Hamilton joined John Coltrane in forming the three biggest-selling artists on that mighty boutique label. Szabo was played on the radio constantly and sold rock band quantities at a time when jazz was supposedly dying. Szabo went from Impulse to Skye Records, a short-lived crossover jazz label that Szabo did in partnership with his friends Cal Tjader and Gary McFarland.

After Skye imploded (that old demon, distribution troubles), Gabor was on Blue Thumb before going over to CTI Records, the premier jazz label of the 1970s. I would recommend a bunch of Gabor Szabo albums to own but all three of his CTI’s are fantastic, especially if you want to hear a sophisticated post-bop Central European get very funky. Mizrab was his first CTI release and its a great place to start.

Art

CTI records are famous for their lush fold-out sleeves often done with bright, saturated colors that pop. This one is not photographed by the great Pete Turner but as an image it really holds up. Very strong. That said, the usually tall and lean Gabor Szabo is not looking his best here. Maybe he was starting to get puffy from the alcohol and drug abuse that would eventually destroy him but the usually handsome Szabo (handsome in a slightly menacing Christopher Lee meets a contract killer kind of way) appears to be a dead ringer for either Phil Collins in a toupee or a chronically depressed Squiggy from Laverne & Shirley rather than his usual, stately, Hungarian self. 

Music

Artists on CTI rarely recorded with their working bands. Creed Taylor believed in making albums that stood out on their own and not ones that captured a touring band at a particular point in time. Instead, the star soloists sat in with a pretty amazing roster of the label’s other recording stars. On Mizrab you get the consistently amazing Ron Carter on bass, Hubert Laws on flute, Jack DeJohnette and Billy Cobham on drums, Ralph MacDonald on percussion, and a small orchestral group sometimes coming in to play Bob James’ charts. Bob James also leads the session and plays keyboards. I believe all of Szabo’s CTI sessions are with Bob James, maybe because Creed Taylor thought it would work to match astral European guitar expansiveness with plugged-in American funkiness. Drop the needle on Mizrab and instantly discover that the combination of cosmic and streetwise works very well.

The title track, “Mizrab” kicks off the LP with a moody, slowly building Eastern European Gypsy vibe with Bob James and Ron Carter complimenting Gabor Szabo, who starts driving the tune forward about 90 seconds in. Billy Cobham’s oddly timed drum patterns and Latin percussion come in with Szabo playing electric guitar like a sitar. This tune is nearly 10 minutes of total freaking amazingness — if Coppola couldn’t have secured the rights to The Doors’ “The End” for Apocalypse Now he could have slotted in “Mizrab” and everything would have still worked for the scenes where Martin Sheen is losing it.

Another Szabo original, “Thirteen” comes next. Its about as long as “Mizrab” but with a completely different feel to it — almost like Django meets Wes Montgomery. “Thirteen” starts out as a noir, almost doomed, romantic ballad and gets darker as it goes along, heightened by DeJohnette’s drum work.  Rudy Van Gelder developed a signature drum sound for CTI to help make the label’s recordings stand apart. Because Bob James became a big name in smooth jazz I’ve read grumblings that he dominates this album to its detriment — nonsense — “Thirteen” is completely Gabor’s tune and his guitar rules throughout it. A parallel to Szabo/James would be George Benson’s recordings with Herbie Hancock for CTI. A sublime fit.  That’s it for side one — perfect for listening to while barrelling forward on the Orient Express. Drama, passion, intrigue, mystery — its all here. Things change on the flipside.

CTI was infamous for combining artistic integrity with baldly commercial interests so the first side of Mizrab is geared towards jazz fans, and even FM rock radio. FM was very open to jazz fusion in the 1970s. Santana, for instance, was a follower of Gabor Szabo (among many other jazz artists) and had great success covering Szabo’s song “Gypsy Woman.” Turn Mizrab over to side B though and you go from FM to AM and more of a relaxing sound. Right off the bat you get lush Courtship of Eddie’s Father style orchestrations on an instrumental cover of Carole King’s “It’s Going To Take Some Time.” Maybe this was aimed at easy listening radio?? Szabo still plays beautifully on it, as he does on the next cut. The orchestra is still there for a reading of Shostakovich’s “Concierto No. 2,” which begins bland and safe and becomes dark and dangerous as it progresses before finally coming in for a soft landing. CTI had great success with jazz covers of classical tunes — this was during an era when a big part of the population knew classical music. The biggest example of this would be with the Brazilian arranger Deodato, whose mainstream chart and radio success helped keep CTI afloat even more than the fast rising stars George Benson and Grover Washington did.

Things take another crazy CTI turn with a concluding cover of Seals & Crofts “Summer Breeze” that starts out just as cheesy as the Carole King cover but is also a whole lot funner. Plus, the band gets progressively funkier on it and Szabo’s playing gets skronkier and more stabbing as it goes along. I don’t have any problem with jazz musicians covering pop hits — knowing how a tune’s chord progressions go helps you understand how musicians are improvising off those chords for one thing. Another is that “Summer Breeze” is a great song — I even dig Ramsey Lewis’ cover of it. Plus, it’s what Szabo & Co. actually do with the song that is special. It starts off like a summer breezy episode of Bosom Buddies but it ends up placing the cross dressing sitcom characters Kip and Henry out on Martin Scorsese’s N.Y.C. Mean Streets. What began as a sunny Central Park romp for the duo ends up with Harvey Keitel bashing their heads in with a trash can lid.

As the 1970s progressed, Gabor Szabo stopped making the top of the jazz charts and the lower reaches of the album pop charts. At the same time, George Benson went from being a respected CTI jazz guitarist to a major pop star at Warners (as a side note, WMG pretty much killed the CTI label with nasty litigation around Benson). And, Gabor Szabo had his demons, regardless of a changing marketplace or matters of fame and fortune.

I have no idea if Budapest at the dawn of the 1980s was a good place to go to escape substance abuse problems but Szabo was the rare person who defected to America from an Eastern Bloc country who then returned home. He played a lot in Hungary towards the end and was highly regarded in his homeland.  But, he had serious health problems and became somewhat bitter about his career (George Benson’s once omnipresent instrumental hit “Breezin” is pretty darn close to Szabo’s earlier recording of a tune that once heard may play in your head forever). Gabor Szabo died in Budapest in 1982 from organ failure due to years of alcohol and drug abuse — he was only in his mid 40s and he left behind a wife and son.

Put Mizrab on the turntable and skip past all of that pain. Its funky and bright and dark and mysterious all at the same time. Like so many CTI albums it balances artistic daring with, at times, laughably commercial, and misguided, instincts (was Gabor Szabo really going to be played on AM EZ listening radio alongside Tony, Orlando, & Dawn???) One number on it may even be trite — but a lot of albums have one bum track — how often do you re-listen to “Revolution #9” on the White Album??? I quickly bypassed the first track on side 2 and now just drop the needle on the second number, pretending the entire album features a singular European jazz master in an elite American setting. Maybe you can find Mizrab on CD — its not on streaming services yet even though it is on Youtube. That said, get the vinyl — it should only cost you a couple of bucks, the music on it is great (for the most part), and the record just sounds fantastic.

— Nick Dedina