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Gabor Szabo, Headless Household, Omar Souleyman and More : Ear Crystals

Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo rips himself off a little Indian classical music for his beautifully wrong 1967 album Jazz Raga (Light in the Attic). Backed by a group featuring ace session drummer Bernard “Hit Maker” Purdie, Szabo overdubbed ragged sitar parts (played on his second-rate instrument’s only two functioning string) over first-rate compositions like “Walking on Nails” and his signature tune, “Mizrab” Szabo even outdoes fellow sitar tyro Brian Jones on the Stones’ “Paint It Black” and sends Gershwin up the Ganges with “Summertime.”

In 1991, Frank Zappa turned the tables on vinyl bootleggers with Beat the Boots, a series of seven bootleg albums he stole back and released legitimately complete with the originals’ dubious fidelity and crappy cover graphics. Zappa’s economic judo undoubtedly inspired Eccentric Beats and Breaks (Numero), which happens to be a stunningly well-produced megamix of the Numero Group’s savvy reissues of obscure gospel, soul, and R&B sounds of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Numero also retained the boot’s hideously perfect skeleton-in-a-Kangol cover art for an album that perfectly blends long-lost soul gems with commercial justice and beats to die for.

Santa Barbara’s Headless Household celebrates 25 years of criminal neglect with a wonderful double album, Basemento (Household Ink). Come for “This, That…,” guitarist Joe Woodard’s song-oriented SoCal strip-mall blend of jazzy bossa nova and Bakersfield country laments (i.e., “Jobim Meets Jim Beam”). But stay for “…The Other,” a disk’s worth of some of the smartest and friendliest psychedelic jazz you’ll ever snuggle up to. Guest saxophonist Dave Binney applies the hot sauce liberally to these nine smart, incisive sonic meditations encompassing everything from British progressives like Henry Cow, gnarly New York downtown jazz, Weather Report’s international feel and the heady cosmic geologies of countless Grateful Dead space excursions.

With Omar Souleyman, there’s no party like a Syrian wedding party—at least when the dance band consists of him and his raging keyboard sidekick, Rizan Sa’id. Jazeera Nights (Sublime Frequencies) is the third Western collection culled from Souleyman’s prolific cassette output. A foreboding presence behind his Groucho Marx-ist mustache, aviator sunglasses and khaffiya headware, Souleyman interprets Arabic poetry—translated song titles include “I Will Dig Your Grave With My Hands” and “Stab My Heart”—with guttural fervor while Sa’id supplies deliriously cheesy keyboard riffs (sometimes reminiscent of Disco Biscuit Aron Magner) and face-slapping percussion. What they join let no man tear asunder.