“Gary and Gabor play together for the first time in a small group. Soft jazz arrangements make this an LP of unusual appeal. Features originals, current tunes like ‘The Word,’ and standards such as ‘Cool Water,’ with unique bits of singing. humming and whistling by Gary and Gabor.” – ABC Records ad copy1
Simpático – the “á” references the Spanish or Portuguese usage of the word, meaning nice, friendly or pleasant – is a strange album of breezy pop ephemera that’s just as bewildering as it is beguiling. In the first and last of their collaborations that pit both names at the top of the bill, Gary McFarland and Gabor Szabo make their first bid for an out-and-out fusion of jazz and pop rock.
The result is not exactly a success and any sign of victory in either genre is likely to put off fans of the other. Most listeners that would even bother to pick this up in the first place will be expecting to hear these two engage in jazz interactions, if not the jazz-lite present on Szabo and McFarland’s previous collaboration, Gypsy ’66, and there’s precious little of that outside of McFarland’s spectacular title track and parts of Szabo’s hypnotic “Spring Song.”
The focus here is on pop music, which finds the two leaders – for better or worse – singing. While their voices make for a peculiar yet not disagreeable blend, Szabo is clearly not the vocalist McFarland is. Together, they work best on the Beatles numbers (“The Word” and “Norwegian Wood”), chiefly due to McFarland’s amazing facility for suggesting a cross between a Beatle and a Beach Boy in his nearly monotonic delivery.
Szabo’s originals (“Yamaha Mama”, “You Will Pay”) aren’t too bad and seem to be the kind of thing he would continue exploring on his Jazz Raga album. Surprisingly, McFarland’s originals (“Hey, Here’s A Heart”, “Ups And Downs”, “She’s A Cruiser”) aren’t among his stronger work and, predictably, never caught on. There are also the seemingly unhip inclusions of “Nature Boy” and “Cool Water,” which probably wouldn’t have appealed to any pop-rock fan who happened upon this set. They’re probably here to snag the attention of the more adult easy-listening audience.
“Glancing at the titles and personnel one might reasonably assume that this LP consists of jazz versions of pop songs, wrote DownBeat‘s Harvey Pekar in a one-and-a-half star review and one of the album’s few notices. “Not so. It contains pop interpretations of pop tunes with a Latin touch added.”
Pekar continues, “The duo of Szabo and McFarland provides the vocals. Their work is inoffensive but undistinguished and lifeless. The producer of this record might have found better singers by choosing them at random from the phone book.
“There are some nice originals here (Heart by McFarland and Pay by Szabo), but these interpretations don’t do them justice. McFarland whistles on some tracks, but this doesn’t come off any better than the singing. In fact, the album has an amateurish quality about it. Only the fine rhythm-section work and Szabo’s few guitar solos are of interest.”2
Others were a bit more circumspect: “The set has a disengaged, trancelike quality except when McFarland whistles,” noted High Fidelity magazine. “His whistling, which has body and vitality, cuts through the limp surroundings like a glistening ray of sunshine.”3
But the music-industry rag Record World made a rather cunning observation for the time that turned out to be mostly prescient when it wrote that “The album proves that the Lennon/McCartney tunes ‘The Word’ and ‘Norwegian Wood’ stand up well under jazz treatment.”4 Sixty years later, we accept it on faith that The Beatles have contributed scores of tunes that remain canonical and coverable.
Simpático was released in August 1966, in a year that saw much more notable Szabo releases, like the guitarist’s debut, Gyspy ’66, and Spellbinder, as well as memorable appearances on Chico Hamilton’s The Further Adventures of El Chico and McFarland’s own Profiles. While the record received few notices and limited sales, it was reissued once, in 1972, at a time when the guitarist’s initial burst of appeal had ebbed somewhat.
To date, Simpático has been issued only once on CD, in 2006 and in Japan only, as part of Universal Music’s lounge-jazz series, “Finger Snapping Music.” The CD is a noticeably warmer listening experience, as it takes off the edge of Rudy Van Gelder’s overly echo-y original recording that could be so nettling on vinyl, an effect which is only amplified by an old record’s crackles and pops.
For certain listeners, this one especially, Simpático possesses a special and unique charm. Even though it’s rather harshly recorded (one of McFarland’s earliest credited productions) and there are some genuinely jarring and incongruous moments on hand in this all-too brief set, repeated listens yield positively remarkable rewards.
The melodies are – as advertised – perfectly “nice,” “friendly” and “pleasant” and beautifully so.
And while the playing is anything but complicated, the songs’ simplicity calls for an especially deft touch. As Easy-Listening Acid Trip5 author Joseph Lanza has noted elsewhere, “easy listening shouldn’t be mistaken for lazy playing.” To convey a musical message with simplicity takes much more skill and technique than unleashing a torrent of notes, something Szabo himself had long professed.
Indeed, the record’s highlights are in the all too-few instances of Gabor Szabo’s piquant and pithy playing, whether comping along or helming an ever too-brief solo.
If anything, Simpático is chiefly remembered today for it’s beautiful Bob Ghiraldini cover photo of McFarland and Szabo in midtown Manhattan, astride Yamaha motorcycles. In a series of strange cross-promotions Impulse producer Bob Thiele was engaged with at the time, the bike provider is even credited on the LP sleeve.
“There was just some oddball, corny kind of cross-promoting things and gimmicky things that were coming out at the same time [Thiele] was doing people like Coltrane,” remembered jazz producer Michael Cuscuna. “It could go from the idiotic to the sublime on some Impulse releases. Some of the Gary McFarland-Gabor Szabo stuff was blatantly trying to get a commercial record. I thought it didn’t hold up then and it doesn’t hold up now.”6
Szabo even namechecked the bike provider in this album’s “Yamaha Mama,” in the likely and unsuccessful bid to score an official theme and, from what I’ve been told, a free motorcycle. Neither came to pass. In an ironic sort of twist, the next time a motorcycle was featured on a Szabo cover – the 1975 album Macho – the photographer, John Paul Endress, knowingly or not, photographed a motorcycle of Yamaha competitor Harley Davidson.
Endnotes:
- Billboard, August 26, 1966, p. 48. ↩︎
- DownBeat, November 17, 1966, p. 32. ↩︎
- High Fidelity, September 24, 1966, p. 134. ↩︎
- Record World, September 17, 1966, p. 10. ↩︎
- Click here to read my review of this book. ↩︎
- Khan, Ashley, The House that Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records (W.W. Norton & Co., New York), 2006, pp. 160-161. Khan cites Simpático as one of five projects Impulse producer Bob Thiele brought McFarland to the label for, noting parenthetically that the record was “a co-headlined and pop-focused project with Gabor Szabo, with the arranger’s lugubrious, multi-tracked vocals on various originals like ‘Ups and Downs’ and Beatles tunes” (p. 292n). ↩︎