Today, the music is something of a marginal sound itself-which can make it a source of inspiration. The rise of rock and R&B pushed exotica gradually out of the mainstream in the late 1950s and ’60s. Cuban musicians like Perez Prado and Xavier Cugat worked in exotica as well. The amazing four-octave-voiced Yma Sumac was from rural Peru Sondi Sodsai was from Thailand. Arthur Lyman himself was of native Hawaiian, European, and Chinese descent. But it also opened the genre to musicians from an unusually wide range of backgrounds. The first wave of exotica often relied on ham-fisted and, frankly, problematic stereotypes about Africa, Latin America, and Polynesia. Alternately, they could let the spritely, bubbling sounds fade in and out of the background as they sipped martinis in a hotel lounge. Consumers could lean back by their hi-fi and imagine themselves swooping around the globe. Musicians in the late ‘40s and ‘50s such as Les Baxter consciously repackaged these tropes in a jazzier setting for suburban pop audiences. Classical musicians like Debussy and Stravinsky had a repertoire of musical devices to convey that feeling, like drones, pentatonic scales, wordless vocals, or unusual percussion. The evocation of the faraway as fantasyland preceded exotica itself. It’s kitschy and fake-and part of the excitement is that, when you cut yourself loose from authenticity, you can create anything.
With these words, Lyman is going for something specific-striving to evoke “youth, beauty, love and passion” in a deliberately “fantastic setting.” The goal is to take the listener not to any one specific geographical place, but to a world that evokes an exciting “somewhere.” In exotica, the world becomes a comfortably strange tourist destination, with plastic palm fronds and animatronic beasts roaring at a measured remove. In this fantastic setting, Pele knows all. It has nothing to do with Christmas, but using this album to decompress from the seasonally mandated disorder, I now feel marvelous, too.The 1957 liner notes for Arthur Lyman’s The Legend of Pele do a good job of summing up the general aesthetic of exotica:Ĭasting aside her cloak of molten lava, she displayed herself as the ever-glorious fire goddess with all the flame of youth, beauty, love and passion. Cleve & His Lush Orchestra, supplemented by Combustible Edison’s the Millionaire and Miss Lily Banquette, joining in on a welcoming “Jingle Bells” and a farewell “Auld Lang Syne.” Also included is “I Feel Marvelous,” a lost B-side taken from a forgotten Broadway show. E! himself introduces the disc, in a newly recorded “super session,” with producer Br. It is followed by “Sun Valley Ski Run,” which sounds like transitional music from a Perry Como specialand I mean that in the best sense. “Snowfall” conjures a frosty winterscape on, say, Venus. There’s nothing depressing about “Blue Christmas” rather, it captures the drowsy feeling of a holiday afternoon on the couch after too much egg nog. The most traditional is “The Christmas Song,” with lovely close harmony by the Skip Jacks. Originally recorded between 1959 and ’62, these 10 songs feature typically idiosyncratic Esquivel arrangements, with lyric fragments and disconnected zoo-zoo-zoos and boink-boinks competing with cascading brass and unexpected Latin rhythms to render overly familiar songs fairly unrecognizable. But, technically, this latest collection from the master of musical madness bears only the slightest resemblance to the saccharine carols that plague us each year. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription.
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