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Exotica Volume II | ||||
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Studio album by | ||||
Released | July 1958 | |||
Recorded | June 1957 | |||
Genre | Exotica | |||
Length | 29:49 | |||
Label | Liberty Records | |||
Producer | Si Waronker | |||
Martin Denny chronology | ||||
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Review scores | |
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Source | Rating |
AllMusic | [1] |
Exotica Volume II was the second album by Martin Denny, released in 1958.
Martin Denny was an American pianist, composer, and arranger. Known as the "father of exotica," he was a multi-instrumentalist and could play a number of percussion instruments. In a long career that saw him performing up to 3 weeks prior to his death, he toured the world popularizing his brand of lounge music which included exotic percussion, imaginative rearrangements of popular songs, and original songs that celebrated Tiki culture.
Arthur Lyman was a Hawaiian jazz vibraphone and marimba player. His group popularized a style of faux-Polynesian music during the 1950s and 1960s which later became known as exotica. His albums became favorite stereo-effect demonstration discs during the early days of the stereophonic LP album for their elaborate and colorful percussion, deep bass and 3-dimensional recording soundstage. Lyman was known as "the King of Lounge music."
Exotica is a musical genre, named after the 1957 Martin Denny album of the same name that was popular during the 1950s to mid-1960s with Americans who came of age during World War II. The term was coined by Simon "Si" Waronker, Liberty Records co-founder and board chairman. The musical colloquialism exotica means tropical ersatz, the non-native, pseudo experience of insular Oceania, Southeast Asia, Hawaii, the Amazon basin, the Andes, the Caribbean and tribal Africa. Denny described the musical style as "a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient...what a lot of people imagined the islands to be like...it's pure fantasy though." While the South Seas forms the core region, exotica reflects the "musical impressions" of every place from standard travel destinations to the mythical "shangri-las" dreamt of by armchair safari-ers.
Lounge music is a type of easy listening music popular in the 1950s and 1960s. It may be meant to evoke in the listeners the feeling of being in a place, usually with a tranquil theme, such as a jungle, an island paradise or outer space. The range of lounge music encompasses beautiful music-influenced instrumentals, modern electronica, while remaining thematically focused on its retro-space age cultural elements. The earliest type of lounge music appeared during the 1920s and 1930s, and was known as light music.
Hypnotique is the fifth album by Martin Denny. Released on Liberty Records in 1959, it was recorded in 1958 at the Kamehameha Schools auditorium and at the Liberty Studios in Hollywood.
What We Did on Our Holidays is the second album by British band Fairport Convention, released in 1969. It was their first album to feature singer-songwriter Sandy Denny. The album also showed a move towards the folk rock for which the band became noted, including tracks later to become perennial favourites such as "Fotheringay" and the song traditionally used to close live concerts, "Meet on the Ledge".
"Caravan" is an American jazz standard that was composed by Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington and first performed by Ellington in 1936. Irving Mills wrote lyrics, but they are rarely sung.
"Pet Sounds" is an instrumental by American rock band the Beach Boys from their 1966 album Pet Sounds. Composed by Brian Wilson, it was originally called "Run James Run", as Wilson intended it to be used as the theme of a James Bond film. It was then titled "Pet Sounds", the title of the album on which it appears. It is the second instrumental to feature on Pet Sounds, the other being "Let's Go Away for Awhile".
Spirit of the Wild is the eleventh studio album by American hard rock musician Ted Nugent. It was released in May 1995 by Atlantic Records. The album was produced by Mike Lutz from the Brownsville Station rock band and engineered by Lutz and Jim Vitti. It is Nugent's only album released in the 1990s.
Exotica is the first album by Martin Denny, released in 1957. It contained Les Baxter's most famous piece, "Quiet Village", and spawned an entire genre bearing its name. It was recorded December 1956 in Webley Edwards' studio in Waikiki. The album topped Billboard's charts in 1959.
Exotica is a musical genre.
Robert Jackson Drasnin was an American composer and clarinet player.
With a Twist... is a 1997 album by Todd Rundgren. Asked to produce an album of new versions of his older singles, Rundgren decided to record the songs in Bossa nova style with elements of Exotica, complete with tropical bird call effects at the beginning of "Hello, It's Me" similar to Martin Denny's recording Quiet Village. Continuing the theme, Rundgren toured theaters with a replica of a tiki bar, the performers on a very small stage with selected audience members being seated at tables also on the theater stage, and being served drinks by the monitor engineer/bartender. The performers never acknowledged the larger theater audience, and the show ended when the last "bar patron" left the stage.
Cowboy Songs III – Rhymes of the Renegades is the eighteenth album by American singer-songwriter Michael Martin Murphey and his third album of cowboy songs. The album is devoted to cowboy folklore and true tales of the West and focuses on real-life outlaws, from Jesse James to Billy The Kid to Belle Starr. Murphey performs these songs "with a scholar's eye and a fan's heart."
"Quiet Village" is an orchestral pop instrumental that was written and originally performed by Les Baxter in 1951 and an instrumental album from 1959 by Martin Denny. In the liner notes to his album, Ritual of the Savage , Baxter described the themes he was conveying in the work:
[t]he jungle grows more dense as the river boat slowly makes its way into the deep interior. A snake slithers into the water, flushing a brilliantly plumaged bird who soars into the clearing above a quiet village. Here is a musical portrait of a tropical village deserted in the mid-day heat.
"Hong Kong Blues" is a popular song composed by American songwriter Hoagy Carmichael in 1939. It was featured in the 1944 film To Have and Have Not, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel by the same name.
Quiet Village: The Exotic Sounds of Martin Denny was the eighth album by Martin Denny. Released in the summer of 1959, the monophonic version of the album reached No. 21 on the Billboard monophonic album chart in November 1959, and the stereophonic version reached No. 12 on the magazine's stereophonic album chart in January 1960.
Forbidden Island was the third album by Martin Denny. The album was produced in March 1958 at the Liberty Studios in Hollywood, following the group's nine-month gig performing at Don the Beachcomber's Bora Bora Lounge in Hawaii. Forbidden Island was Denny's first album to be recorded and released after vibraphonist Arthur Lyman left the group to pursue his own solo career. The album includes four original compositions by Denny: "Cobra", "Exotica", "Primitiva", and "Forbidden Island".
Primitiva (LRP-3087/LST-7023) was the fourth album by Martin Denny. Released in August 1958, it was recorded at Liberty Studios in Hollywood and released on Liberty Records. In October 1958, it reached No. 27 on the national Cashbox chart.
August "Augie" Borero Colon was an American musician known for his work as a percussionist in the exotica genre. He came to national fame as a member of Martin Denny's band in the 1950s and was the voice behind the bird calls and jungle sounds of the hit single "Quiet Village". He also recorded two solo albums, Sophisticated Savage (1959) and Chant of the Jungle (1960). In the early 1960s, Colon left Denny's group and toured with his own band known as The Tropicales.