Blurring the lines between swinging pop and finger-clicking jazz cool, The Sorcerer is irrepressibly stylish. A proper ‘wish you were there’ vibe.
Born in Budapest in 1936 and raised on a mix of folk music and Western jazz broadcast behind the Iron Curtain, Gábor Szabó fled Hungary during the 1956 uprising. He landed in the U.S., eventually studying at Berklee and making his name in Chico Hamilton’s group in the early '60s. By 1967, Szabó had already proven himself a formidable sideman, but The Sorcerer — recorded live over two nights at Boston’s Jazz Workshop — is where his vision really took flight; a heady mix of jazz chops, pop motifs, modal explorations and something else entirely.
Released on the boundary-pushing Impulse! label, The Sorcerer is the sound of five players - Gábor Szabó and Jimmy Stewart on guitars, Louis Kabok on bass, percussionist Hal Gordon and Marty Morrell on drums - locking into hypnotic grooves at a dazzling pace.
The Sorcerer opens with a cover of “The Beat Goes On” — a bold move in the jazz world of 1967, but in Szabó’s hands, they leap over the hazard of novelty and stretch out the grooves with a low-key menace humming underneath. It’s a statement of intent: this one is not stuck in the jazz club. The set moves between originals and select covers, with Szabó’s signature “Mizrab” offering an early highlight. It’s here that you really grasp what made him so distinct: he plays the guitar like it’s a sitar, a drum, and a saxophone all at once. It’s dextrous, but also incredibly stylish — he’s barely breaking a sweat while turning your brain inside out with a blur of fingers.
There are albums that grow on you, and there are albums that just click. For us, The Sorcerer absolutely clicks — and right from the off.
Without ever being stuck in one gear, it just rolls ever forward, never letting up but without ever feeling rushed. The album is so often about perfect balance, floating somewhere between Sunday morning grooves and late night bar-bite. Likewise, Szabó leads clearly as a virtuoso, but it’s never overly showy. Throughout, Jimmy Stewart is right there with him and the dual-guitar interplay is absolutely magic: conversational, exploratory and completely locked in. Even when they’re covering familiar material, they take it somewhere new without ever losing the thread. It is never an album that grandstands; it just simmers between sophistication and accessibility, traditionalism and almost psychedelic zones.
It took sorcery indeed to capture this lightning in a bottle.
