LES BAXTER, WILLIAM GEORGE, and EXOTICA

Another album I heard a lot as a child was Ritual of the Savage by Les Baxter. Sometimes the living room just wasn't large enough for my dance moves. I was a skinny little blue eyed blond with a soul calling out for Exotica and Mahalia Jackson. Even my mother called me weird.

Click on any image to see it larger.

Les Baxter (March 14, 1922 – January 15, 1996) was an American musician and composer.

Baxter studied piano at the Detroit Conservatory before moving to Los Angeles for further studies at Pepperdine College. Abandoning a concert career as a pianist, he turned to popular music as a singer. At the age of 23 he joined Mel Tormé's Mel-Tones, singing on Artie Shaw records such as "What Is This Thing Called Love?".

Baxter then turned to arranging and conducting for Capitol Records in 1950, and conducted the orchestra of two early Nat King Cole hits, "Mona Lisa" and "Too Young", but both were actually orchestrated by Nelson Riddle. (In later releases of the recordings the credit was corrected to Riddle. Not an uncommon practice these days: Baxter himself had arranged Nat King Cole's "Nature Boy" in 1947 for a recording conducted by Frank De Vol. In 1953 he scored his first movie, the sailing travelogue Tanga Tika. With his own orchestra, he released a number of hits including "Ruby" (1953), "Unchained Melody" (1955) and "The Poor People Of Paris" (1956). He also achieved success with concept albums of his own orchestral suites: Le Sacre Du Sauvage, Festival Of The Gnomes, Ports Of Pleasure, and Brazil Now, the first three for Capitol and the fourth on Gene Norman's Crescendo label. The list of musicians on these recordings includes Plas Johnson and Clare Fischer.

Baxter also wrote the "Whistle" theme from the TV show Lassie.

Baxter did not restrict his activities to recording. As he once told Soundtrack! magazine, "I never turn anything down".

In the 1960s, he formed the Balladeers, a besuited and conservative folk group that at one time featured a young David Crosby. He operated in radio as musical director of The Halls of Ivy and the Bob Hope and Abbott and Costello shows.

Like his counterparts Henry Mancini and Lalo Schifrin, Baxter later worked for the film industries from 1960s to 70s. He worked on movie soundtracks for American International Pictures where he composed and conducted scores for Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films and other horror stories and teenage musicals, including The Pit and the Pendulum, The Comedy of Terrors, Muscle Beach Party, The Dunwich Horror, and Frogs. Howard W. Koch recalled that Baxter composed, orchestrated, and recorded the entire score of The Yellow Tomahawk (1954) in a total of three hours for $5,000.

When soundtrack work reduced in the 1980s, he scored music for theme parks and SeaWorlds. In the 1990s, Baxter was widely celebrated, alongside Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman Group, as one of the progenitors of what had become known as the "exotica" movement. In his 1996 appreciation for Wired magazine, writer David Toop remembered Baxter thus:

Baxter offered package tours in sound, selling tickets to sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll around some taboo emotions before lunch, view a pagan ceremony, go wild in the sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home hi-fi comforts in the white suburbs.

Les Baxter has a motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6314 Hollywood Blvd. (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

Click on the Wikipedia link above to see a list of his recordings. Click here to read more about Baxter. And click here to go to the official Les Baxter site.

As to the cover artist, who I believe is William George (1930-):

William George is a world-famous illustrator who studied with Norman Rockwell and began his career painting covers for magazines such as Argosy and Cavalier, as well as for paperback westerns and crime novels by authors such as Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. He has been commissioned to paint portraits of figures ranging from Charlton Heston and Bette Davis to Cole Porter and Frank Sinatra and his art has appeared in publications ranging from Reader’s Digest to The Saturday Evening Post and Life magazine. His work can currently be found in a number of art galleries. (SOURCE: Hard Case Crime)

Click here to read a bit more about the artist. And click here to see what I believe may be a photo of him. If anyone else has anything to contribute about William George just let me know.

Now on to some Exotica. As I said the other day, kick off your shoes and go native. Dance baby, dance!

ARTHUR LYMAN...sounds of my childhood

There was a background music for growing up in Hawaii in the late 1950s and early '60s: Exotica. Of course I didn't know at the time it had such an exotic name, it was just the music I heard all the time. It was the music that had me dancing in the living room. It was the music I used to teach my best friend how to dance. No Arthur Murray dance lessons for us; it had to be Arthur Lyman. Think seven year old Isadora Duncan's in the jungles of our imagination.

Click on any image to see it larger.

From left to right: Allen Soares, John Kramer, Arthur Lyman, Harold Chang

Arthur Lyman was born on the island of Kauai in the U.S. territory of Hawaii, on 2 February 1934. He was the youngest of eight children of a Hawaiian mother and a father of Hawaiian, French, Belgian and Chinese extraction. When Arthur's father, a land surveyor, lost his eyesight in an accident on Kauai, the family moved to the island of Oahu and settled in Makiki, a section of Honolulu. Arthur's father was very strict with him, each day after school locking him in a room with orders to play along to a stack of Benny Goodman records "to learn what good music is." "I had a little toy marimba," Lyman later recalled, "a sort of bass xylophone, and from those old 78 rpm disks I learned every note Lionel Hampton recorded with the Goodman group." He became adept at the 4-mallet style of playing which offers a greater range of chord-forming options. He became good enough to turn professional at age 14 when he joined a group called the Gadabouts, playing vibes in the cool-jazz style then in vogue. "I was working at Leroy's, a little nightclub down by Kakaako. I was making about $60 a week, working Monday to Saturday, from 9 to 2 in the morning, and then I'd go to school. So it was kind of tough."

Exotica Music
After graduating from McKinley High School in 1951, he put music on hold to work as a desk clerk at the Halekulani hotel. It was there in 1954 that he met pianist Martin Denny, who, after hearing him play, offered the 21-year old a spot in his band. Initially wary, Lyman was persuaded by the numbers: he was making $280 a month as a clerk, and Denny promised more than $100 a week. Denny had been brought to Hawaii in January on contract by Don the Beachcomber, and stayed in Hawaii to play nightly in the Shell Bar at the Hawaiian Village. Other members of his band were Augie Colon on percussion and John Kramer on string bass. Denny, who had traveled widely, had collected numerous exotic instruments from all over the world and liked to use them to spice up his jazz arrangements of popular songs. The stage of the Shell Bar was very exotic, with a little pool of water right outside the bandstand, and rocks and palm trees growing around. One night Lyman had had "a little to drink," and when they began playing the theme from Vera Cruz, Lyman tried a few bird calls. "The next thing you know, the audience started to answer me back with all kinds of weird cries. It was great." These bird calls became a trademark of Lyman's sound.

When Denny's "Quiet Village" was released on record in 1957 it became a smash hit, igniting a national mania for all things Hawaiian, including tiki idols, exotic drinks, aloha shirts, luaus, straw hats and Polynesian-themed restaurants like Trader Vic's.

That same year, Lyman split off from Denny to form his own group, continuing in much the same style but even more flamboyant. For the rest of their careers they remained friendly rivals, even appearing together (with many of their former bandmates) on Denny's 1990 CD Exotica '90. Although the Polynesian craze faded as music trends changed, Lyman's combo continued to play to tourists nearly every Friday and Saturday night at the New Otani Kaimana Beach Hotel in Honolulu throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. He also performed for years at Don the Beachcomber's Polynesian Village, The Shell Bar, the Waialae Country Club and the Canoe House at the Ilikai Hotel at Waikiki, the Bali Hai in Southern California and at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. During the peak of his popularity Lyman recorded more than 30 albums and almost 400 singles, earning three gold albums. Taboo peaked at number 6 on Billboard's album chart and stayed on the chart for over a year, eventually selling more than two million copies. The title song peaked at number 55 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1959. Lyman's biggest pop single was "Yellow Bird," originally a Haitian song, which peaked at #4 in July 1961. His last charting single was "Love For Sale" (reaching number 43 in March 1963), but his music enjoyed a new burst of popularity in the 1990s with the lounge music revival and CD reissues.

Lyman died from thoracic cancer in February 2002.

Recording Details
Most of Lyman's albums were recorded in the aluminum Kaiser geodesic dome auditorium on the grounds of the Kaiser Hawaiian Village Hotel on Waikiki in Honolulu. This space provided unparalleled acoustics and a natural 3-second reverberation. His recordings also benefited from being recorded on a one-of-kind Ampex 3-track 1/2" tape recorder designed and built by engineer Richard Vaughn. All of Lyman's albums were recorded live, without overdubbing. He recorded after midnight, to avoid the sounds of traffic and tourists, and occasionally you can hear the aluminum dome creaking as it settles in the cool night air. The quality of these recordings became even more evident with the advent of CD reissues, when the digital mastering engineer found he didn't have to do anything to them but transfer the original 3-track stereo masters to digital. The recordings remain state-of-the-art nearly 50 years later. (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

On a trip back to Oahu, after once again living on the Mainland, we went with friends to a lounge where the Arthur Lyman group was appearing. One of their good friends was Arthur's percussionist, Harold Chang. In between sets Harold came over and sat down at our table, Arthur dropped by too. I kept thinking how cool it all was. I was actually meeting Arthur Lyman and the man who did the percussion and bird calls. If only my friend had been there we'd have been dancing on the tables. It wouldn't have been pretty, but it would have been lively.

The Kaiser Dome at the Kaiser Hawaiian Village Hotel also has special meaning to me. I performed (badly) on the stage twice. One show was with my ballet troupe. We performed Sleepy Beauty. I was the purple fairy and the fairy before me stole my lines leaving me standing at the microphone speechless. I was so popular I was brought back years later to appear in a Hawaiian variety show. I performed several numbers with my hula troupe. I then retired from the stage except for one truly horrendous performance as a mother in a Christmas play in the 7th grade.

Another piece of info about the Hawaiian Village is that it was where the headquarters for the detective agency was located on the tv show "Hawaiian Eye." I was a big fan of "Hawaiian Eye" and had a crush on Poncie Ponce. I had my Poncie hat and record and was a happy keiki. A few years ago I found out a friend's dad played poker with Poncie each week. As a surprise she called me one time and told me there was someone who wanted to speak to me; she put Poncie on the phone. Oh I was all giggles and 10 years old again. She sent me a signed photo from Poncie. It's a keeper!

Now everybody, kick your shoes off and go native!