Spellbinder (1966) is Gabor Szabo’s (1936-82) “breakout” album and remains, six decades later, one of the Hungarian guitarist’s very best in a slim discography that numbers only about a dozen-and-a-half studio recordings. Recorded in May 1966 and released in October of that year, Spellbinder is the second album the guitarist Gabor recorded, but his third release as a leader (Simpático, the record he co-led with Gary McFarland, was released two months earlier).
In some ways, the record is as much an introduction to one of jazz’s most distinctive guitarists and his capabilities as it is his farewell to a “traditional” kind of jazz recording. It’s as though he’s telling listeners “here’s what I can do,” while warning that he doesn’t plan to stay there.
Szabo admits as much in the album’s liner notes, when he says, “I feel so strongly that in every form of music there is a distinctive type of beauty, and therefore, I welcome the coming together today in pop music of many different kinds of musical cultures and instruments. And from my jazz-oriented perspective, I’m moving more and more in that direction too.”
Listeners first became steeped in Gabor Szabo’s unique style and thoroughly hypnotic approach in the Chico Hamilton Quintet in the early sixties (Szabo’s “Lady Gabor” became one of the group’s most popular pieces). In 1964, Szabo tied with fellow Hungarian Attila Zoller (1927-98) to top the DownBeat Critics Poll.
As Dan Morgenstern aptly observed, Szabo has “a beautiful guitar sound, great flexibility and a fine ear”1 while Leonard Feather noted that “[h]is intervals and chord usages are unusual; he is a master of what Whitney Balliett has called ‘the sound of surprise’.”2
Szabo left Hamilton’s group in 1965, expanding his reach and appeal in both the challenging Charles Lloyd Quartet, and in the early crossover efforts of the Gary McFarland Quintet. The guitarist then waxed his own solo debut, Gypsy ’66, much more of an extension of the McFarland group concept than a personal statement.
Spellbinder is just such a statement. And what a powerful statement it is. It makes an especially strong case for Szabo’s largely self-taught approach and the result is, indeed, spellbinding.
Here, the guitarist is beautifully supported and effectively accompanied by his old boss, drummer Chico Hamilton (1921-2014), bassist Ron Carter (b. 1937 – like Szabo, Carter’s first jazz gig was with Hamilton’s quintet), and Latin percussionists Victor Pantoja (1939-2010) and Willie Bobo (1934-83). The exact same grouping had convened only four days earlier (with added horn players) for several tracks on Hamilton’s own The Further Adventures of El Chico.
That album’s two standout tracks – both features for the guitarist – include “Who Can I Turn To (When No One Needs Me)” and Szabo’s own haunting “Evil Eye” and serve as perfectly compatible companion pieces to the whole of Spellbinder.
II.
It is often said when Gabor Szabo played something hypnotic or especially exotic-sounding, that he was channeling his “roots” or “Gypsy heritage.” But neither the guitarist nor his family were Gypsies. Whether the title of the guitarist’s debut earlier in the year, Gypsy ’66, was his choice or a marketing tactic, it also contributed to the deception. For better or worse, the appellation, notably marking his otherness, stayed with him throughout his career and remains in place to this day.3
As the largest ethnic minority in Hungary, the Gypsies did, however, inspire the guitarist, notably on this particular album. Opening with the especially commanding title track, Szabo said of the piece, “that when I hear it, it strikes me like the effect on someone of an old gypsy woman’s curse. It has the feeling of witchery, the casting of spells.” He credits this to the “primitive hypnotic” groove of the rhythm section.
“Spellbinder,” like “Gypsy Queen,” was largely developed in the studio – as many of Szabo’s later “compositions,” including Bobby Womack’s “Breezin’,” often were. With the former, Szabo likely had a basic melody line – a riff, really – and the group took it from there. Szabo admits as much about the latter song in the liner notes: “I used it to warm up before we started recording.” The other musicians, too, fell into line and took their cue from that.
Szabo’s “Yearning” feels more like a thought-out melody. Here, he takes the unusual step of humming along to the melody, one he felt had the unique changes of something Burt Bacharach would write for Dionne Warwick. It’s not nearly as effective as the previous two originals on the disc. But it resonates with a strange hypnotic pull.
Oddly, despite the recognition (and financial rewards) of “Gypsy Queen,” following Santana’s hit 1970 version of the song, Szabo did not, to my knowledge, include the song on his setlists. “Spellbinder,” on the other hand, remained a popular feature of Szabo’s concert sets. Live versions of the song can be heard on Szabo’s More Sorcery (1967) and Gabor Szabo Live with Charles Lloyd (1974).
The only concession to the pop-rock crowd here is Szabo’s cover of Cher’s 1966 hit “Bang Bang,” on which the guitarist sings in the monotone drone to which was his alone. The song, which would later get covers by both Frank Sinatra and Lady Gaga, was already in the Top 10 when Szabo waxed his own not altogether unsuccessful version.
The jazz standards are where Szabo’s real abilities and engaging appeal shine through. Two pieces here – “Witchcraft,” which Szabo played while in Hamilton’s quintet (a version from 1962 is heard on the 1990 CD Transfusion) and “It Was a Very Good Year” – are associated with Frank Sinatra, the former in 1957 and the latter from 1965. Szabo’s Latin take on “Witchcraft” is particularly fetching. Indeed, the editors of the website SecondHandSongs named Szabo’s version of “Witchcraft” its “cover song pick.”
“My Foolish Heart” opens and closes with a moving dialogue between Szabo’s heartfelt guitar and Ron Carter’s ever-sensitively considered bass counterpoint (Carter switches to arco bass for the song’s gorgeous conclusion). Szabo solos reflectively, if not even a bit languorously in the song’s mid-section (about a minute and half of playing time), accompanied by Carter and the percussionists. It is a marvelous performance.
Szabo kept “My Foolish Heart” in his repertoire over the years and was captured playing it with Hungarian musicians on his triumphant 1974 return to his homeland (the song can be heard on Gabor Szabo in Budapest and The Complete Gabor Szabo in Budapest).
The album concludes with a medley of chansons paired together: one, “Autumn Leaves,” well known, while, the other, “Speak to Me of Love,” is more obscure. While each was composed by different songwriters, what unifies them – other than Szabo’s keen imagination – is that both tunes acquired English-language lyrics by Johnny Mercer.
The guitarist had likely previously played “Autumn Leaves” with the Hamilton quintet (the song is covered on the 1961 album The Chico Hamilton Special, waxed immediately before Szabo joined the band). But even though Carter had spent much of the previous two and a half years performing the song with the Miles Davis Quintet, Szabo gamely handles this first section of the medley (about a minute and a half of playing time) on his warmly metallic solo guitar.
The rest of the band is brought in for “Speak to Me of Love,” where Szabo performs only the song’s refrain, before concluding with a tasty bit of improvisation. Strangely, neither the Mercer medley nor “Speak to Me of Love” stayed in the guitarist’s repertoire. But “Autumn Leaves” endured for Szabo. He can be heard playing it on Live in Cleveland and on at least one unauthorized recording captured during the period.
For an album with more than a few memorable moments, perhaps Spellbinder reaches its apogee on the little-known and hardly ever commented upon original “Cheetah.”
From the clever, organic melody – which feels much more pre-determined than those Szabo originals made up on the spot – to the blisteringly beautiful solo, it is a neat, compact, if not altogether all too-brief, stunner of a listen. Carter’s bounding bass and Hamilton’s nearly preternatural timekeeping go a long way to propel the guitarist to some of his finest-ever fingerpainting. It is mindboggling that nothing ever came of “Cheetah.”
Named for a popular and trendy New York City discotheque of the day, the Cheetah club had opened only ten days before Szabo recorded the song. Indeed, at the very time Szabo waxed his original, the band Curtis Knight and the Squires – featuring a young Jimi Hendrix – was performing there. (In April 1967, the Velvet Underground performed a benefit show there with Tiny Tim [!] and later that year, Pink Floyd made its American debut at Cheetah.)
“Its emblem was a lithe female body with head and paws of cheetah,” Szabo told Nat Hentoff in the album’s liner notes. “To me, it symbolized this whole age – the urge to be ‘in’, ‘mod’ clothes and all the rest of it. There was something very sleek and sassy about that cheetah and also something decadent about it, which in turn reflected all the corruption going on today. And so I decided to try to write a tune expressing what’s happening now.”
Oddly, the song seems to reflect the exact opposite of Szabo’s surprisingly harsh assessment. “Cheetah” feels like the celebration, rather than the condemnation, of “cool.” But I wouldn’t be surprised if Szabo secretly found the whole idea of Cheetah appealing: If, for nothing else, than to check out Hendrix, whose innovative use of feedback would greatly influence Szabo the following year.
III.
Spellbinder was released in October 1966, along other such Impulse discs as Archie Shepp’s Live In San Francisco, Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard Again!, Roswell Rudd’s Everywhere and Clark Terry and Chico O’Farrill’s Spanish Rice. It was the third Szabo record released that year.
“Szabo creates a brand of magic,” wrote Billboard, “that should cast an appealing spell over large segments of the folk, jazz and pop buying markets. His amplified guitar has a delicate and haunting, yet compelling sound.”4 By January 1967, the album was rising in both the Jazz and R&B charts of the time.
When Billboard launched its very first “Best Selling Jazz LPs” chart on March 11, 1967, Spellbinder landed at number two, just behind the Cannonball Adderley Quintet’s hit album Mercy, Mercy, Mercy. The record managed to remain on the chart through early July, outlasting the brief six-weeks run of Szabo’s subsequent disc, Jazz Raga (released in April 1967) had.
Journalists covering Szabo’s shows even remarked that interest in Spellbinder was positively increasing the guitarist’s audience size.
“Gabor Szabo is beautiful,” wrote critic Michael Zwerin in his otherwise rambling four-star DownBeat review of the disc. “He gets a twangy, wistful, gypsy, personal sound out of his guitar . . . open, uncluttered, and free. . . The album reveals a distinctive, musically deep, and honest personality.”5
Two singles from the album were released. But while they may have attracted some initial attention, neither performed particularly well. First was a two-minute and 54-second edit of “Gypsy Queen” – which Cash Box called an “[i]nteresting, infectious jazz piece,”6 – backed with “Bang Bang.” Then, in January 1967, a two-minute and 59-second edit of “Spellbinder,” backed with a two-minute and 57-second edit of “Witchcraft” came out.
Neither side of either single was named the “A-side” or “Play Side,” in the likely hope that DJs would decide which of the two sides to play. But in an ABC Records ad that trumpeted “It’s a hit singles world at ABC…,” the song “Spellbinder” was named as that single’s A-side.7
Three Spellbinder tracks (“Spellbinder,” “Witchcraft,” “Gypsy Queen”) would later be featured on the compilationThe Best of Gabor Szabo (1968) while the album’s title track, “My Foolish Heart” and “Yearning” factored on the 1971 compilation His Great Hits (surprisingly, “Gypsy Queen” is not on this one).
Despite the fact that several other Szabo titles haven’t aged particularly well or stood the test of time, Spellbinder‘s reputation has only grown in strength over the years.
“This set is all Szabo, drifting, wafting, and soaring above all that rhythm,” wrote Thom Jurek in his four-and-a-half star AllMusic review. “Szabo’s read on jazz in the ’60s was brilliant. He embodied all of its most popular aspirations with a genuine spirit of innovation and adventure. Spellbinder is a masterpiece.”8
The jazz guitar great Steve Khan adds, “Though I suppose the event passed essentially unnoticed, for me, the release of Gabor Szabo’s “SPELLBINDER” on CD for the first time was a very joyous day! … I believe that if you have to have just one Gabor Szabo recording, THIS is the one!!!”9
Spellbinder was issued on CD in Japan as early as 1998 (and then again in 2001, 2010 and 2015), while a domestic and European CD came out in 2001. The disc was also perfectly paired by producer Matthias Künnecke with the earlier Gypsy ’66 as part of the Impulse 2-on-1 CD series in 2015.
The record was again reissued on vinyl in 2007 by the Sundazed Music subsidiary, Euphoria (with the Euphoria logo and catalog number replacing the original Impulse logo on the front cover), and, then again, as part of the Verve Vault Series of 180-gram vinyl reissues in March 2026.
Guitarist Lee Ritenour – who also recorded a cover of Szabo’s “Mizrab” elsewhere – recorded an especially nice cover of “Spellbinder” (with an inspirated addition of tabla) for his 2006 disc Smoke ‘N’ Mirrors.
Afterword: The Szabo-Santana Connection
While Szabo’s compositions have been sparsely covered by other musicians, “Gypsy Queen” became, perhaps, the guitarist’s best-known composition in 1970, when the rock group Santana included a brief iteration of the “song” (more of a “lick,” really) at the end of its cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Black Magic Woman.” The song, featured on the group’s second album Abraxas10 (Columbia C 30130), reached number four on the Billboard charts in November 1970.
“I’ll never forget,” Spellbinder producer Bob Thiele (1922-96) told me years ago. “I had gone into the office on a Saturday and I was opening the mail and there was a royalty statement from Columbia Records. It must have amounted to 30 or 40,000 dollars11 for ‘Gypsy Queen’ being part of ‘Black Magic Woman.’ I called Gabor and said, ‘Gabor, are you sitting down or standing up?’ I said, ‘sit down.’ I told him and he really freaked out on the phone. He just couldn’t believe it. He was so happy and I was happy that he was happy. It was a delightful moment, really.” (This story seems a bit apocryphal to me…but this is what I was told.)
Carlos Santana, the group’s leader, has always expressed admiration publicly for Szabo and his influence. In a June 1978 interview for Guitar Player magazine, Santana claimed that his band had been exclusively a blues band until he’d heard Spellbinder in 1966. Santana was drawn to the appeal of the album’s conga sounds and credits this with the beginnings of his band’s “crossover” fusions.
Santana’s band had already been playing Chico Hamilton’s “Conquistadore Rides Again” – based on “Conquistadores,” originally a feature for both Szabo and Willie Bobo, originally heard on Hamilton’s 1966 LP El Chico – in performances as far back as 1968. A performance of “Conquistadore Rides Again” was issued on the 1997 disc Santana Live At The Fillmore ’68, but other versions of the song, caught in 1969 and 1970, have appeared on other unofficial releases.
The two guitarists did, in fact, forge a friendship several years later, which resulted in Szabo spending one summer in the early 70s as Santana’s house guest and playing with Carlos’ group.
When Carlos Santana was looking to change the musical direction of his band in 1972, Gabor offered Carlos the opportunity to unite musically. Santana, while flattered and excited by the offer, chose instead to pursue a fusion direction (inspired by a deep religious spirituality) with British guitarist John McLaughlin; forming the band with Larry Young on organ, which would record the album Love, Devotion and Surrender (Columbia KC 32034) in early 1973.
Later, in a January 1981 DownBeat interview, Santana announced the dedication of his song “Gardenia” to Szabo. The song, originally conceived with Szabo’s collaboration, was issued on the 1980 Devadip Carlos Santana album, The Swing of Delight (Columbia C2 36590), which also featured Spellbinder bassist Ron Carter. “Gabor Szabo is my spellbinder,” said Santana at the time; “I look forward to recording an album with him someday.”
While such a recording never occurred, Santana later featured Szabo in his 1995 Influences, where he discusses the “influence” of the Hungarian guitarist (and that of fellow guitarists Bola Sete and Wes Montgomery) on him, while generously sharing clips of Szabo in a performance from 1977.
Santana’s success with “Gypsy Queen” elicited other covers of the song by Count Basie (!), with a transfixing Oliver Nelson arrangement, on Afrique (1970), Larry Coryell on Barefoot Boy (1971) and, with lyrics, by Leon Thomas for Blues and the Soulful Truth (1971) – all produced by Spellbinder producer Bob Thiele for his post-Impulse label, Flying Dutchman Records.
Other covers of “Gypsy Queen” can be heard by Mike Keneally (1996), Tyburn Tall (1996) and “The Magic of Santana” band, featuring Alex Ligertwood and Tony Lindsay (2016). Szabo’s version of “Gypsy Queen” was also featured on the “Poguelandia” episode of the Netflix TV series “Outer Banks” (2023).
Years later, Abraxas Pool – a group of original Santana members Neal Schon, Gregg Rolie, Michael Shrieve, Michael Carabello and Jose “Chepito” Aires – featured the song “Szabo” on their lone eponymous disc (1997). Drummer Shrieve would name his short-lived group, Michael Shrieve Spellbinder, in honor of Szabo, whose influence greatly informed the band (the group, which issued only two discs in 2008 and 2016, played “Spellbinder” at shows, but never officially recorded the song).
Most recently, Carlos Santana featured his own thoroughly spellbinding original “Mr. Szabo” – which beautifully captures and honors many aspects of the Hungarian’s musicality – on the 2012 disc Shape Shifter.
Endnotes:
- Liner notes to Chico Hamilton Quintet’s Passin’ Thru (Impulse/1963). ↩︎
- Feather, Leonard, The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the 60s (Da Capo Press, New York), 1967, p. 270. ↩︎
- Stefano Orlando Puracchio aims, if not to dispel this myth of marketing hype, which he felt crippled the guitarist’s potential, then to call it out, in his Italian-language biography Gábor Szabó – il jazzista dimenticato (2022). ↩︎
- Billboard, December 31, 1966, p. 31. ↩︎
- DownBeat, January 26, 1967, pp 31-32. ↩︎
- Cash Box, October 1, 1966, p. 34. ↩︎
- Cash Box, February 11, 1967, p. 21. ↩︎
- https://www.allmusic.com/album/spellbinder-mw0000389250 (accessed on May 18, 2026). This review supplants an earlier one by Scott Yanow in the book All Music Guide to Jazz (2002), noting that Spellbinder “is one of the Hungarian guitarist’s better recordings. … One to search for.” ↩︎
- These quotes come from Khan’s tremendous analysis and transcription of Szabo’s solo on the song “Spellbinder”: http://www.stevekhan.com/spellbindera.htm (accessed May 18, 2026). ↩︎
- Santana recorded and released additional performances of “Gypsy Queen” in 1973, 1977 and 1993 and as part of Santana IV (2016). ↩︎
- As of this writing, in May 2026, that equates to about $272,000 to $363,000 in today’s dollars. ↩︎
Thank you, Doug. I cannot imagine anyone tieing all of Gabor’s strings together better than you do.