Jazz Raga

Jazz Raga (1967)
Gabor Szabo

1. Walking on Nails (Gabor Szabo)
2. Mizrab [aka Rising] (Gabor Szabo)
3. Search for Nirvana (Gabor & Alicia Szabo)
4. Krishna (Gabor Szabo)
5. Raga Doll (Gary McFarland)
6. Comin’ Back (G. Szabo/C. Otis)
7. Paint It Black (M. Jagger/K. Richard)
8. Sophisticated Wheels (Gabor Szabo)
9. Ravi (Gabor Szabo)
10. Caravan (D. Ellington/J. Tizol/I. Mills)
11. Summertime (G. Gershwin/D. Heyward)
12. You Are My Sunshine (Davis/Mitchell)

Gabor Szabo – guitar, sitar (except 8), vocal (1, 3)
Bob Bushnell – fender guitar (1-3, 5, 7, 9)
Jack Gregg (as Johnny Gregg) – bass  
Bernard “Pretty” Purdie – drums
Ed Shaughnessy – tabla (2)

Produced by Bob Thiele
Engineered by Rudy Van Gelder
Liner notes by Nat Hentoff
Cover painting by Gabor Szabo

Recorded on August 4 (4, 6, 8, 10-12) and August 17 (1-3, 5, 7, 9), 1966, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

1 to11 issued on LP in 1967 as Impulse A(S)-9128
7 (edit) and 8 (edit) issued on 45 as Impulse 45-257

I.

Jazz Raga is a brilliant, even witty, though much-derided record featuring Szabo’s distinctive guitar and his overdubbed, slightly out-of-tune sitar playing. Flawed, though too easily dismissed, this 34-and-a-half minute set contains some of Szabo’s best compositions and his always notable guitar work: enchanting single-line runs mixed with jangled chords, repetitive riffs/drones and memorable, melodic solos.

For his third solo outing, Szabo wanted to record with up and coming fellow guitarist Larry Coryell (1943-2017), to bring in more of a “rock” feel. The two had worked side-by-side in Chico Hamilton’s group, as Szabo was phasing himself out and Coryell was very briefly working himself in. At the time, Coryell was also gigging around New York City with Memphis-born bassist Jack Gregg.

Coryell was also part of what is now considered one of the very first jazz-rock bands, The Free Spirits, which released its sole Bob Thiele-produced, Rudy Van Gelder-recorded and terribly disappointing outing, Out of Sight and Sound, at about the same time as Jazz Raga.

“Gabor asked Jack, [Free Spirits drummer Bob] Moses, and me…to be on his record,” recalled Coryell in his autobiography. “We got Moses’s dad to drive us out to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio, although we showed up so late that they had already done the date with other musicians.”¹

Gregg, who is oddly credited here as “Johnny,” did, however, make the date. No one properly explains the absence of Coryell and Moses, but the uncredited arranger on the date, Gary McFarland, quickly recruited the now legendary drummer Bernard Purdie, who brought along his aide-de-camp, the Fender bassist Bob Bushnell, for one of the two August 1966 recording dates.

While it’s intriguing to imagine what might have been with Coryell, it’s worth appreciating what was actually achieved. In addition to spicing up the proceedings with sitar (on nine tracks), Szabo fills in for Coryell by overdubbing his guitar on many of the disc’s songs, something he would continue to do throughout his career, particularly when no other guitarist is present.

The core unit consists of bassist Gregg – who would later co-found the early seventies jazz-rock band Compost, with Moses, Harold Vick and drummer Jack DeJohnette – Fender bassist Bob Bushnell (on six tracks) and drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie. Each contributes successfully to the real groove of the record. It’s a new and welcome sound for the guitarist. There is a palpable drive and enthusiasm that is often lacking on a few too many of Szabo’s later studio dates.

For his part, Szabo is energized by his support. He is at once lyrical and fiery on guitar, making Jazz Raga one of his finest six-string showcases. Even the odd-sounding sitar isn’t as obtrusive as is so often suggested. As far as “learning on the job” goes, Szabo proves he can easily charm any stringed instrument.

II.

The program features 11 short, catchy, radio-friendly tunes, seven of which are Szabo originals. Highlights among these are such Szabo signature pieces as “Mizrab” and “Comin’ Back,” the guitarist’s set closer for much of the rest of his career. The title “Mizrab,” named for the steel finger pick used to play Indian stringed instruments such as the sitar, was suggested to Szabo by no less than Larry Coryell himself.²

This version of “Mizrab,” given a nice funk undercurrent by the rhythm section, was soon morphed with another Szabo original, “Flowers and Love” (another vamp, from the 1967 Steve Allen album Songs For Gentle People, on which Szabo was a guest), to craft the version that was first heard on The Sorcerer (1967) and became the way that “Mizrab” was represented forever thereafter.

“Mizrab” would stay in Szabo’s repertoire throughout the remainder of his career and the guitarist would wax studio versions of the song again on Small World (1972) and as the hypnotic title track to his 1973 CTI debut (there, with Gregg’s fellow Compost member Jack DeJohnette).

The song has also been covered by an eclectic range of performers, including Lee Ritenour and Oscar Castro Neves (1974), Sansara Music Band (as “Gabor’s Elephant Dance,” 1976), Psychedelic Guitar Circus (1994), Dan Sperber/Luke Casey (2003), the Hungarian guitarist János Bujdosó’s collective Flemm (2024), and, most notably, again by Lee Ritenour in 2002.

Other Szabo originals include the ominous album opener “Walking on Nails” and the spooky “Searching for Nirvana,” as well as the superb vamps “Krishna,” “Sophisticated Wheels” and “Ravi.” Each brings out Szabo’s ability to effectively express and compress strong musically melodic ideas. Producer Bob Thiele would repurpose both “Krishna” and “Sophisticated Wheels” – with Szabo as guest soloist – for his own mind-altering 1967 pop big-band outing Light My Fire.

Szabo’s take on “Paint it Black”(also covered by The Soulful Strings and fellow guitarist Joe Pass) isn’t as convincing as the truly cosmic “Caravan,” yet there is surely nothing like the acid-funk banger of his “Summertime,” where “the living is,” if not “easy,” then certainly “sleazy.” Gary McFarland, who contributed uncredited charts for the record, adds his tasty track “Raga Doll,” as clever a title as it is a song.

During these sessions, a version of “You Are My Sunshine” was also recorded, but remains, to this day, unreleased.

III.

Jazz Raga was released to surprisingly little fanfare in January 1967, along with 11 other Impulse albums, in a typical “market dump,” including John Coltrane’s Kulu Se Mama. Given the rising interest in Indian music fusions in popular culture (The Beatles, Rolling Stones), however, Jazz Raga took several more months to find its audience. (It’s also possible that the LP was advertised months before its actual release.)

A single was also issued, with a 2:35 edit of “Sophisticated Wheels” on one side and a 2:36 edit of “Paint it Black” on the other. Today, it is widely assumed that “Paint it Black” was the a-side, but the April 15, 1967, issue of Cash Box magazine – the only music periodical to cover the single release – indicates that “Sophisticated Wheels” was the intended a-side.

Jazz Raga was ultimately welcomed by fans and the curious alike, reaching number 10 on the Billboard Jazz chart in May 1967, at a time when the more enduring Cannonball Adderley Quintet’s Mercy, Mercy, Mercy and fellow guitarist Wes Montgomery’s California Dreamin’ were topping the charts. Szabo’s previous disc, Spellbinder, sat that week at number 11.

Soon after Jazz Raga was released, Szabo penned an article in Jazz magazine titled “The Influence of India.” The article reads as both a press release and a defense of both the record’s deficiencies and Szabo’s willingness to openly experiment with jazz forms.

In the article, Szabo declares that Indian music had captured his fascination and emotional involvement as far back as 1961. He elaborates upon his enthusiasm for the music of Ravi Shankar, as well as his success imitating the sitar’s sustained-note drone sound on his guitar. In discussing the difficulties of playing a sitar, he even alludes to his unfortunate experiences on the recently recorded Jazz Raga: “the instrument I used recently was inferior, with very bad keys, which made it extremely difficult to keep in tune.”³

The critical response to Jazz Raga was – predictably, perhaps – mixed.

“Gabor Szabo, who is having one wail of a year,” wrote Eliot Tiegel, “adds the Indian sitar to his instrument line-up on Jazz Raga (Impulse), a term which should cause diehard fans to shudder in much the manner they cringed when jazz-rock was first mentioned. (…) Nonetheless, the album is a fine blending of Eastern and Western cultures, punctuated by the shrill tones of the sitar dubbed over Szabo’s own guitaring. The leader credits a new-found spark to the propelling drumming of Bernard (Pretty) Purdie, a last-minute substitute for the recording session. Five of the album’s 11 tracks hear an Indian inspiration in the title and all are Szabo originals. There is a calming effect produced by the sitar which also has a haunting quality and which helps sell the album.⁴

DownBeat‘s Pete Welding was a bit more skeptical in his otherwise encouraging three-star review. “First off, let me state my real admiration for Szabo’s playing. (…) Too, I am most sympathetic to the idea of a fusion of jazz and Indian musical disciplines: each has expressive and technical resources that can seem to be possible and even desirable.

“This synthesis does not take place here, however. On none of the nine performances to which Szabo dubs in the sound of sitar under his guitar improvisations is any meaningful marriage of West and East consummated. In fact, what we have here are the preliminary stages of a courtship that may or may not prove successful— eventually.”

Welding also pointed out a facet of Jazz Raga that would put off a number of others over the years: “Mention of a further difficulty will not, I hope, seem mere carping, but I believe that guitar and sitar should be tuned to the same pitch. They are out of tune with each other on every track. (…) There is [however] some exemplary guitar improvising on the LP…his improvisations generally are balanced, fluid, and extremely sensitive.”⁵

IV.

Jazz Raga sold well enough to merit several re-pressings, however, keeping the album in print well in to the early seventies, when the interest in Indo-jazz fusions had long since waned. The album wound up collecting dust in used-record store bins until later artists such as Beck discovered it and started talking about it as an inspiration to his hit album Odelay (1996). Beck, who is the son of David Campbell, the arranger of Szabo’s final studio recording, Femme Fatale, put it this way:

“‘[Gabor Szabo]’s a freaky jazz-guitar guy from the ’60s. Kind of corny psychedelic. Like there’s one album called Jazz Raga. Basically, he cut a record, then the next day he was in a shop and he bought a sitar. So he got all excited and just went and played sitar over everything. And he didn’t know how to play the sitar. The song starts out, doo-doo-doo-diddle kind of jazzy-guitar stuff, but then all of a sudden the sitar goes wah wah! It just sounds so fucked-up and good.’”⁶

Once major stars such as Madonna and John Legend began sampling Szabo’s music, a whole new generation learned about the guitarist. Then, such songs as “Caravan,” “Sophisticated Wheels” and, notably, “Mizrab” began popping up on CD compilations, introducing new listeners to the particular charms of Jazz Raga specifically.

In the summer of 2010, the high-quality boutique label Light in the Attic Records issued Jazz Raga on LP and, for the first time ever, CD, investing the album with a renewed cache, complete with a superbly informative set of liner notes by Ugly Things writer Doug Sheppard and a revealing 1967 DownBeat interview with the guitarist.

DownBeat‘s John Ephland contemporaneous two-star assessment of the LITA release wasn’t particularly kind to what he regarded as a time capsule: “[T]he reissue of Hungarian-born guitarist Gabor Szabo’s Jazz Raga (recorded in 1966) recalls a time when jazz was already looking beyond its borders, anticipating what might now be termed world music. It is a mixed bag, partly due to how it tried to straddle the fence with the ascendant pop and rock music of the day. (…) Szabo’s balancing act of guitar and sitar was a worthy experiment, but Jazz Raga is of interest primarily as a cultural statement and less as one future musicians might refer to.”⁷

In November 2025, the Spanish Vampisoul label released a 180-gram vinyl issue of Jazz Raga as originally issued – mostly – with no enhancements and the original front, back and inside sleeves reproduced as is. There are minor differences between the original Impulse release and the Vampisoul reissue – such as as the record’s label reproducing the seventies-era Impulse logo minus the “ABC” addition – but one variation in the actual recording stands out.

The version of “Comin’ Back” heard on the Vampisoul release is not the one on the original issue of Jazz Raga, but rather the version that serves as the coda to the aforementioned live album The Sorcerer.

V.

Ephland and other critical naysayers miss a crucial point of the record. While it is enjoyable on its own merits, Szabo’s failed experiment playing the sitar on Jazz Raga helped him reconsider his own already distinctive approach to the guitar. Almost immediately, listeners could detect the sound of the sitar in Szabo’s guitar playing. This change was already noticeable on Szabo’s next album, The Sorcerer, particularly on that record’s songs “Space” and, naturally, “Mizrab.”

Writing about Szabo’s performance at the first annual Los Angeles Jazz Festival at UCLA in May 1967, Eliot Tiegel remarked that the guitarist’s solo on Gary McFarland’s “Mountain Heir,” a song McFarland wrote for and dedicated to Szabo, “was dominated by a sitarish effect, produced by his delicate fingering and turning his instrument toward his loudspeaker to create a high-pitched sound which he was able to control.”⁸

The further adventures of Szabo’s “sitarish” sound on guitar are evident on Bacchanal and Dreams (both 1968) through at least Mizrab (1973) and the guitarist’s guest appearances on saxophonist Paul Desmond’s Skylark (1974) – all very worthy releases in the guitarist’s all-too limited discography.

Shortly after the release of Jazz Raga, British saxophonist Joe Harriott (1928-73) teamed with the Calcutta-born violinist and composer John Mayer (1930-2004) to release three especially fine editions of their own Indo-Jazz Fusions (1967-69).

Later, the Bombay (now Mumbai)-born guitarist Amancio D’Silva (1936-96) – who had earlier worked on hundreds of Bollywood soundtracks – arrived on the London scene, bringing his own brand of Indo-jazz fusion to the fore. D’Silva was influenced by the guitarists he heard on the radio, like both Wes Montgomery and Gabor Szabo. The evidence is plain on the Indian guitarist’s solo debut Integration (1969) and the wonderful Konkan Dance (1974, but unissued for years thereafter).

Indo-jazz fusion would get a sort of revival in the seventies with certain iterations of British guitarist John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra (McLaughlin was, at the time, a devotee of Sri Chinmoy) and, later on, through the “neo-fusions” of the Madras-born L. Subramaniam, composer of the wildly popular 1988 soundtrack to Salaam Bombay!

Jazz Raga, warts and all, remains – to this day – one of Gabor Szabo’s most enjoyable and significant records. I would certainly rank it among the guitarist’s three or four best solo albums. While there is no shortage of vocal critics of the record, I suspect there’s a formidable number of listeners out there – new and old – who have tripped over this record, or searched desperately hard for it, who are mesmerized by Jazz Raga‘s many charms.

Indeed, superlatives for this album are shorthand for its entrancing magical spell. Jazz Raga is an “important record” that “has developed something of a cult following” and relevance for its “Great artistry.” “Fascinating.” “Groundbreaking.” “Remarkable.”⁹ I agree with them all.

Endnotes:

1. Coryell, Larry, Improvising: My Life in Music (New York, Backbeat Books, 2007), p. 55. ↩︎
2. Coryell, ibid. ↩︎
3. Jazz, March 1967. ↩︎
4. Billboard, April 1, 1967, p. 12. ↩︎
5. Downbeat, May 18, 1967, pp. 32-33. ↩︎
6. Spin, August 1996. ↩︎
7. DownBeat, October 2010, p. 57. ↩︎
8. Billboard, May 27, 1967, p. 12. ↩︎
9. “important record,” Rate Your Music review by “streetmouse” (https://rateyourmusic.com/music-review/streetmouse/gabor-szabo/jazz-raga/73887764). “a cult following,” Mike Stax, Ugly Things #54, p. 72. “Great artistry,” Cash Box, April 8, 1967, p. 32. “Fascinating,” Audio, October 1967, p. 78. “Groundbreaking,” Modern Drummer, February 2015, p. 54. “Remarkable,” Libisch, Károly, Feketére Festve: The Bio-Discography of Guitarist Gábor Szabó (Budapest, Kariton, 2020), p. 33. ↩︎