- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- High Contrast is considered to be one of Gabor Szabo’s best collaboration albums, with Bobby Womack writing four of the seven songs.
Gabor Szabo and Bobby Womack – High Contrast (1971): The album cover for High Contrast identifies the recording artist only as Gabor Szabo, but the record labels list both him and Bobby Womack. Allmusic describes High Contrast as “a truly wonderful early exercise in highly polished, funky jazz”. I didn’t know who Gabor Szabo was when I got this album, but I was somewhat familiar with Bobby Womack, so I went for it. Gabor Szabo is from Hungary and left his home country on the eve of the Communist uprising; he eventually made his way to America by the late 1950’s. Gabor Szabo is “cool” enough to have been written up in Mike Stax’s influential music magazine Ugly Things, in Issue #54 (Summer 2020); a follow-up interview with his bassist Louie Kabok appeared in Issue #56 (Spring 2021). Gabor Szabo was largely self-taught on the guitar, melding Hungarian folk music with jazz, psychedelic rock, and Eastern rhythms into a highly distinctive style. Bobby Womack consistently landed songs on the R&B charts but rarely crossed over onto the pop charts. His best-known song is probably “It’s All Over Now” that was covered by the Rolling Stones in 1964; “It’s All Over Now” became their first #1 U.K. hit single. I have another, unexpected cover of one of Bobby Womack’s hit songs, “Across 110th Street” by the punk/gross-out band the Gynecologists. High Contrast is considered to be one of Gabor Szabo’s best collaboration albums, with Bobby Womack writing four of the seven songs and providing rhythm guitar. The opening track “Breezin’ ” has been called the first smooth jazz song; on High Contrast, it is an instrumental (as are all of the other songs), but Bobby Womack also wrote lyrics for the song. Five years later, in 1976, smooth-jazz exponent George Benson had his biggest hit album with Breezin’ that includes as the title song a vocal version of “Breezin’ ”, now considered to be a standard. Breezin’ is one of the best-selling jazz albums of all time, selling three million copies, and reached #1 not only on the Billboard jazz chart, but the pop and R&B charts as well.