Various - Technicolor Paradise: Rhum Rhapsodies & Other Exotic Delights

Lisätietoa:

t was a musical cocktail born in a marketing meeting: Two parts easy listening, one part jazz, a healthy dollop of conga drums, a sprinkling of bird calls, and a pinch of textless choir. Serve garnished with an alluring woman on the album jacket for best results. Liberty Records co-founder Si Waronker called it Exotica; the soundtrack for a mythical air conditioned Eden, packaged for mid-century, tiki torch-wielding armchair safariers. In the five years after Exotica—Martin Denny’s 1957 landmark Liberty debut—arrived, hundreds of other ethnographic forgeries washed up in record racks all over the U.S., bearing titles like Sophisticated Savage, Sacred Idol, Chant of the Jungle, Polynesian Paradise, Exotic Paradise, Taboo, Primitiva, Forbidden Island, Afrodesia, Hypnotique, Percussion Exotique, and a barrel’s worth of other portmanteaus. “All of those ica and itiva endings I came up with because I thought I was being cute,” Waronker said. “And I don’t know why, but nobody got wise.” While Liberty certainly had a first mover advantage, it wasn’t long before the major recording companies began reinventing their aging mood music purveyors as pushers of peregrine percussion. And where the majors went, so too did the rest of the market. Dozens of readings on the genre standards like “Quiet Village,” “Similau,” “Miserlou,” “Caravan,” “Nature Boy,” “Moon of Manakoora,” and “Taboo” appeared on micro-pressed 45s and LPs as hotel lobby combos and restaurant entertainers alike tried their hand at creating regional living room lotus lands while others summoned their own sonic visions of Shangri La, bringing their versions of the Pacific, Africa, and the Orient to the hinterlands America.