Fusion Best 100: Gábor Szabó & The Section
A Hungarian guitarist teams up with an R&B star and a group of soft rock session musicians show off their fusion chops.
An increasingly early-rising toddler, a case of hand, foot, and mouth disease1, and the kid’s first birthday celebration conspired to render this newsletter (mostly) dormant for a few months, but nothing can keep the fusion at bay forever.
In case you’re wondering, this issue of Attenuator is part of an ongoing project (I’d previously fooled myself into thinking it could be accomplished in the span of a year). I’ll be listening to and writing about every record featured on the Fusion Best 100 list — a ranking of the 100 best Western jazz fusion albums released between 1969 and 1989, as selected by the writers of Japanese magazine Record Collectors (レコード・コレクターズ).
This week’s pairing of albums features a Hungarian guitarist and a rising R&B star finding common musical ground in the studio, as well as a group of session musicians casting off the shackles of ‘70s soft rock in favor of their own, subdued strain of fusion.
92. Gábor Szabó - High Contrast (1971)
It’s unclear exactly how guitarist Gábor Szabó and R&B singer/guitarist Bobby Womack ended up in a studio together (writer Douglas Payne claims that Szabó’s label Blue Thumb was responsible), but the pairing came at a transitional moment for both musicians. Hungarian-born, Berklee drop-out Szabó was a few records into his solo career (after stints as a sideman for the likes of Chico Hamilton and Charles Lloyd) and beginning to let more rock instrumentation seep into his six-string jazz. A former member of a family gospel band, Womack was shifting from working as a session musician (for greats like Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles) to becoming an R&B singer, songwriter, and hit-maker. Across two sessions spent recording tracks for High Contrast, Szabó and Womack found common ground in the stylistic freedom of jazz fusion.
High Contrast is an anomaly in Szabó’s catalog because it doesn’t contain a single jazzy cover of a pop song. Instead, it opens with “Breezin’,” a Womack-penned track that became a bonafide crossover hit when guitarist George Benson covered it five years later (Japanese guitarist Masayoshi Takanaka also released a city pop-inflected version). Though it boasts a string arrangement and the same indelible melody, Szabó’s rendition of “Breezin’,” isn’t nearly as grandiose as Benson’s, opting for a more restrained (but no less technical) lead guitar part made up of appropriately breezy licks that Szabó super-fan Carlos Santana would eventually sneak into one of his own songs.
The remainder of the record is split evenly between Szabó originals and Womack compositions, and they’re relatively easy to discern without glancing at the credits. Szabó’s contributions are the most stylistically diverse, including a winding psychedelic rock-inspired tune (“Amazon”) and some string-dappled guitar balladry (“Azure Blue”). Womack sticks to what he knows best, applying a jazzy sheen to R&B instrumentation (akin to the sound the Crusaders were just beginning to explore), including a stripped-down rendition of the title track of his 1971 solo album, Communication. Womack would go on to have a successful solo career that was derailed by his drug addiction and a stint in rehab, while Szabó would record a few more albums ahead of a legal tussle with the Church of Scientology2 and his untimely death in 1982 at the age of 45. Though there’s an improbable quality to the pair’s collaboration, the music that Szabó and Womack created together feels predestined, making High Contrast a bit of jazz fusion kismet preserved on tape.
91. The Section - The Section (1972)
How does a quartet of Los Angeles session musicians blow off steam after cementing the soft-rock sound of the early ‘70s via their performances on James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James and Carole King’s Tapestry? For guitarist Danny Kortchmar, drummer Russ Kunkel, and bassist Leland Sklar (collectively known throughout the LA studio scene as “the Mellow Mafia”, alongside guitarist Waddy Wachtel), the antidote to providing the underpinnings of gentle rock ballads was a jazz fusion side project.
The Section’s debut album took shape via post-soundcheck jam sessions during an early ‘70s tour as the backing band for James Taylor (who also came up with the group’s not-all-that-creative name). Kortchmar, Kunkel, and Sklar cut the record with fellow session musician Craig Doerge on keyboards, tapping young saxophonist (and fusion mainstay) Michael Brecker to perform on a few tracks.
Even at its most frenetic (namely, the latter half of opening track “Second Degree”), there’s a somewhat restrained, dialed-in quality to The Section, befitting a group of seasoned session players. Amid the taut riffs of “Doing the Meatball” and the plodding slow-burn of “Swan Song,” the aptly-named “Sporadic Vacuums of Thought” is the only track that sound halfway spontaneous. It’s a brief glimpse at the unrehearsed energy the group likely channeled while workshopping these compositions in their spare time — my guess is that the somewhat clinical quality of the remainder of the record can be chalked up to putting a bunch of session musicians in their “office environment,” the recording studio.
In a 2023 interview with the LA Times, Sklar admitted that the Section’s albums never sold especially well, going so far as to claim that “nobody bought them.” It’s an easy stance to take when you’ve played on records that have sold millions of copies, but the presence of The Section on the Fusion Best 100 is proof that at least a few people (namely overseas jazz writers) bought a copy of Sklar and his band’s passion project — and savored every slice of it.
A Fistful of (Old) Links
Japan Times contributor Gabrielle Doman wrote an interesting piece about the increasing number of tourists who are shopping at Japanese record stores (or visiting the country expressly to buy records, whether for personal collections or to resell). Buoyed by an interest in vintage city pop and jazz records (which younger listeners are discovering via YouTube) and favorable exchange rates, customers from overseas are driving up the prices of Japanese LPs — but they’re also making a sizable contribution to the bottom line of record shops throughout Japan.
Back when Pitchfork announced the end of its Chicago-based music festival, I theorized that a new event might fill the void in mid-July. But former Pitchfork Music Festival talent-buyer (and Chicago musician and venue-owner) Mike Reed needed a little more time to cook — the inaugural edition of the Reed-programmed Sound & Gravity Festival will take place September 10-14. The multi-venue event bears more than a passing resemblance to Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival, gathering a similar array of legacy and contemporary acts that fall somewhere on the jazz, experimental, and new music spectrum.
While we’re on the subject of interesting new Chicago-based music festivals, local ensemble Third Coast Percussion is hosting a one-day event on June 28. Rhythm Fest takes over the Epiphany Center for the Arts (not far from Pitchfork Fest’s former home in Union Park), hosting performances in five different spaces throughout the venue. Highlights of the lineup include avant-garde musician Tyondai Braxton, footwork producer Jlin, and Brazilian-American composer Clarice Assad. If you end up going, let me know how it is — wish I could make it.
That’s all for now, but there’s more fusion to come! Next issue, we’ll tackle the Roy Ayers album that delivered the most-sampled song of his career, plus a record of trumpet-forward fusion from a licensed pilot who is not Nathan Fielder.
I’ve now learned that adult cases of hand, foot, and mouth are kind of like catching a medieval plague involving very itchy hands and an intense burning sensation on your feet. And there’s really no treatment other than letting it run its course, shedding a few layers of dermis along the way.
None other than Chick Corea is at least partially to blame for this sordid chapter in Szabó’s life. Seeking treatment for a heroin addiction, Szabó checked himself into a Scientology-affiliated facility in the late ‘70s. At some point during his treatment, Szabó signed a contract with a management company that was helmed by Corea. Szabó later filed a lawsuit against the Church of Scientology, alleging that he’d been coerced to sign a contract as part of his treatment for addiction and that the church had embezzled money from him while using his name to promote Scientology. Szabó eventually settled out of court, shortly before his untimely death in 1982.