Tiki culture is an American-originated art, music, and entertainment movement inspired by Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micronesian cultures. Inspired by Oceanian art, influential cultures to Tiki culture include Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, the Caribbean Islands, and Hawaii. The name comes from Tiki, the Māori name for the first human, often represented in the form of hei-tiki, a pendant and important taonga. The hei-tiki was often appropriated by Europeans as a commercialised good luck charm, hence the name of Tiki culture. Despite spanning over 10,000 miles and including many different unrelated cultures, religions, and languages, Tiki aesthetic is considered by some to be amalgamated into one "fantasia of trans-Pacific cultures" and "colonial nostalgia". Because of this, and the simplistic view of the Pacific taken by the aesthetic, Tiki culture has often proved controversial.
Leslie Thompson Baxter was an American musician, composer and conductor. After working as an arranger and composer for swing bands, he developed his own style of easy listening music, known as exotica and scored over 250 radio, television and motion pictures numbers.
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.
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.
Salli C. Terri was a singer, arranger, recording artist, and composer. Record audiences still cite Terri's "haunting" vocals, with Hi-Fi Review originally describing her as "a mezzo soprano whose velvet voice and astonishing flexibility has hardly an equal at present."
Deadbolt is an American rock band from San Diego, California. Fusing rockabilly and surf music with tongue-in-cheek horror-themed lyrics, Deadbolt has called itself the "scariest band in the world", classifying their musical style as "voodoobilly".
Morton Sanford Garson was a Canadian composer, arranger, songwriter, and pioneer of electronic music. He is best known for his albums in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Mother Earth's Plantasia (1976). He also co-wrote several hit songs, including "Our Day Will Come", a hit for Ruby & the Romantics. According to Allmusic, "Mort Garson boasts one of the most unique and outright bizarre resumés in popular music, spanning from easy listening to occult-influenced space-age electronic pop."
Combustible Edison was an American neo-lounge music group founded in the early 1990s in Providence, Rhode Island. They were one of several lounge acts that led a brief resurgence of interest in the genre during the mid-1990s.
Milton "Shorty" Rogers was an American jazz musician, one of the principal creators of West Coast jazz. He played trumpet and flugelhorn and was in demand for his skills as an arranger.
Fred Steven "Skip" Heller is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Although active in many different types of music as a performer, producer, and historian coming out of the Philadelphia jazz scene, and in spite of local critical recognition, he did not make a large mark in his hometown.
Charles Allan Gerhardt was an American conductor, record producer, and arranger.
Blue Rose is the debut studio album by Rosemary Clooney, in collaboration with Duke Ellington and his orchestra, released in mono on Columbia Records, catalogue CL 872. Although she had appeared on albums before, it had been in the context of either a musical theater or multiple artist recording. The album also marked the return of Ellington to Columbia after an absence of four years, and was one of the first examples of overdubbing being used as an integral part of the creation, rather than for effects or to correct mistakes.
Orienta is an album by The Markko Polo Adventurers released in 1959. The album was produced by Simon Rady, arranged and conducted by Gerald Fried and recorded in stereo in Hollywood, California. The album uses a combination of sound effects and Asian-inspired music to tell humorous vignettes. Its suggestive cover art features a photograph by Murray Laden.
"Drifting and Dreaming, Sweet Paradise," is an American popular song written, copyrighted, published, and licensed by ASCAP in 1925. Lyrics are by Haven Gillespie, music is by Egbert Van Alstyne and Erwin Roeder Schmidt (1890–1966), and Loyal B. Curtis (1877–1947), L.B. Curtis, Music Publisher, New York. It was a major hit in 1926 for George Olsen.
La noche de los mayas is a film score by the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas for the 1939 film of the same name, which relates to Mexico's pre-Columbian heritage. Revueltas's score consists of 36 sequences without any organic relation to one another, composed to be easily fitted to an already-edited film. The work is best known in the symphonic suite extracted by the Mexican conductor José Yves Limantour, whose arrangement extensively alters Revueltas' original score.
Bacchus Archives is a record label that has often released previous unreleased recordings. Some of the recordings it has released, includes recordings by artists such as The Controllers, Evan "Funk" Davies, The Dils, Peter Miller and Bob Thompson. It is also sublabel of Dionysus Records.
Kirby Allan was an American record producer who is best remembered for his work with Chaino, in the musical genre of Exotica, and the Jungle variant of Tiki culture music. Their collaboration and unusual marketing strategy began with a series of albums in the late 1950s. Those albums continue to be released as recently as 2016.
Lui Tsun-Yuen was a Chinese composer and teacher of Chinese classical music. He is known for his compositions and recordings of the pipa and guqin, and is recognized for bringing Chinese music to Western audiences.
Technicolor Paradise: Rhum Rhapsodies & Other Exotic Delights is a 2018 compilation album of exotica music released by music label The Numero Group.
The Tikiyaki Orchestra is a seven piece modern exotica band that combines the sounds of traditional exotica with the Music Of Hawaii, surf music, crime jazz, lounge music and space age pop to create a soundtrack for the Tiki sub-culture.
