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In Reply to: RE: Gabor Szabo find posted by vinylfind on July 19, 2014 at 16:51:28
Yeah, I have that and a few others by Gabor from the late 60s early 70s. If you like the Creed Taylor/CTI sound of that period, you'll like it. It sounds like all the others. Great light jazz/funk, which I like, but a lot of people can't stand. LOL.He had kind of a stiff style, like Howard Roberts, which sounds great playing straight jazz, but over the funky stuff ... well, he's no Ernie Isley!
It's not valuable or collectible, if that's what you were asking a out.
Edits: 07/19/14Follow Ups:
I fully agree on Szabo playing in “a stiff style,” but I would never follow that with “like Howard Roberts.”
Roberts was one of the most swinging jazz guitar soloists ever, IMHO (of course).
Can you name a tune or an album where you thought he played stiffly?
Have you ever heard his “Antelope Freeway” LP?
-=- Charlie F.
I just picked up a copy of Howard Roberts' Spinning Wheel. It's all funk/rock numbers, late 60/s, LA session guys, etc. Great record, great sound, but his playing is the least funky part of the whole affair. Don't get me wrong, he is great and, as I wrote, his straight ahead playing is superb. But the string bending is painful! The producer should have told him to switch to a lighter gauge of strings.
You can also hear the musicians furiously turning the pages of their sheet music during the breaks, which made me chuckle.
Thanks, Frank.
I can understand where you're coming from. And, yes, during the heyday of his recordings (late ’50s – late ’70s), he used very heavy strings.
Just to continue the "stiff/not-stiff" conversation for a moment, even on the “Spinning Wheel” LP, his feel doesn't strike me as being stiff. To me, stiffness relates to groove and flow; I don't hear his playing as mechanical or square at all. No, he certainly wasn't playing with a rocky funk feel. But I doubt that that would have flown with the album's producer, even if Roberts had wanted to do something along that line. I can imagine an A&R guy saying, "Hey! The kids are goin' for fuzz guitar and stuff. Let's see if we can get a little of that airplay … without losing our target market." Or something equally vapid.
I wouldn't have expected him to put out an album with that sort of voice. Make no mistake: almost all of his many releases were oriented for the "smooth jazz" side of FM radio – very commercial. The tunes/arrangements were indeed creatures of the studio; the songs tended not to be part of his live performance repertoire.
If you ever want to hear something quite a bit looser from Howard Roberts, you might look for "Antelope Freeway."
Happy spinning,
-=- Charlie F.
Thanks for your comments. Reading over the liner notes I see Bob James was involved so based on what I have heard of his stuff, I get the picture. Not really my cup of tea.
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