The Sound of the Sorcerer
Szabó plays jazz like a man who learned the rules somewhere else entirely — and that's the point.
There’s a moment on Gábor Szabó’s The Sorcerer where his guitar does something you simply don’t expect from a jazz record made in 1967. The notes bend and slide in a way that sounds, all at once, like a sitar, a Delta blues guitarist, and a Hungarian folk musician. That’s the Szabó trick.
After leaving Hungary in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution, Szabó came to the United States and studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston. He absorbed bebop harmony and the vocabulary of American jazz, but his fingers never forgot the music he had brought with him from Hungary. Later, blues, rock, Latin music, and the sound of the sitar would also become part of his musical palette.
The result is a guitar language that refuses to fit neatly into a single category. On this Impulse! recording, Szabó brings jazz into conversation with folk music, blues, and psychedelia—sometimes within the space of just a few notes. It’s precisely that hard-to-place quality that makes The Sorcerer so fascinating.
A record that still sounds as if it comes from somewhere that hasn’t quite been given a name.
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