More Jazz Recordings Featuring the Guitar

Reviews and Commentaries for Gabor Szabo

• With two nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sides, this original Impulse pressing is close to the BEST we’ve ever heard, right up there with our Shootout Winner – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
• Szabo’s best albums are full of Tubey Magic and dead-on-the-money instrumental timbres – this live one puts you smack dab in the middle of an intimate jazz club in 1967, your very own time machine
• If you want to hear the warmth, size and energy of the tape, this vintage LP is the way to go
• “Gabor Szabo’s quintet featuring Jimmy Stewart was one of the guitarist’s very best units. Live performances like this, recorded at Boston’s Jazz Workshop, document some of the excitement the group stirred in 1967-1968. The playing seems inspired, and the interplay within the group is something to behold…”

These Nearly White Hot Stamper pressings have top quality sound that’s often surprisingly close to our White Hots, but they sell at substantial discounts to our Shootout Winners, making them a relative bargain in the world of Hot Stampers (“relative” being relative considering the prices we charge). We feel you get what you pay for here at Better Records, and if ever you don’t agree, please feel free to return the record for a full refund, no questions asked.

This vintage Impulse stereo pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What outstanding sides such as these have to offer is not hard to hear:

• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1967

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

What We’re Listening For on The Sorcerer

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Then: presence and immediacy. The guitar isn’t back there somewhere, lost in the mix. It’s front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put it.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
• Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks for the guitar notes, not the smear and thickness so common to most LPs.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

The Beat Goes On
Little Boat (O Barquinho)
Lou-ise
What Is This Thing Called Love?

Side Two

Space
Stronger Than Us
Mizrab
Comin’ Back

AMG  Review

Gabor Szabo’s quintet featuring Jimmy Stewart was one of the guitarist’s very best units. Live performances like this, recorded at Boston’s Jazz Workshop, document some of the excitement the group stirred in 1967-1968. The playing seems inspired, and the interplay within the group is something to behold — even when performing lightweight tunes like “The Beat Goes On.”