| Technicolor Paradise: Rhum Rhapsodies & Other Exotic Delights | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Compilation album by Various artists | |
| Released | May 25, 2018 |
| Genre | Exotica |
| Length | 137:31 [1] |
| Label | The Numero Group |
| Producer | Ken Shipley & Rob Sevier [2] |
| Compiler | Ken Shipley & Daniel Shiman [2] |
Technicolor Paradise: Rhum Rhapsodies & Other Exotic Delights is a 2018 compilation album of exotica music released by music label The Numero Group.
Technicolor Paradise: Rhum Rhapsodies & Other Exotic Delights was described by Gary Graff of Billboard as a compilation of exotica music from the 1950s and early 1960s. [3] The compilation focuses on the more unheard of musicians of the genre opposed to its more well known musicians like Esquivel or Les Baxter. [3] Ken Shipley of The Numero Group stated that while previous compilations of exotica music from the 1990s such as Ultra-Lounge were focused on the major labels, his idea was to develop them from the more independent music scene of the genre. [3]
Shipley's interest in creating this compilation was after discovering the website The Exotica Project, where he noted that "Not everything on there is good, but it manages to capture a moment and show there's a moment underneath the movement." [3] Shipley compiled nearly 700 songs for the compilation and narrowed down the choices based on personal taste and licensing availability. [3] The compilation is split into three discs: Daiquiri Dirges, Rhum Rhapsodies and Mai Tai Mambos. [4] The first section focuses on guitar instrumentals, the second on vocal tracks and the third takes features more dance-oriented and jazz-influenced music. [4]
Technicolor Paradise: Rhum Rhapsodies & Other Exotic Delights was released by The Numero Group on compact disc and vinyl on May 25, 2018. [1] [3] The album contains 54 songs on the compact disc version and 48 on vinyl. [3]
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| All About Jazz |   [4] |
| AllMusic | [1] |
All About Jazz's gave the album a four out of five star rating, noting that the album "shows the diversity of the genre" and that it was "an expertly compiled compendium of cool musical kitsch that is worth diving into." [4] Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic gave the album four stars, declaring that the compilation served as "supporting evidence that the exotica craze was really as vast as it seemed on any number of '90s lounge reissues. Just as importantly, this music is every bit as frothy and fun as the music made by the well-known names of exotica, and that's the reason why any hep cat or kitten should get this set." [1]
Daiquiri Dirges
Rhum Rhapsodies
Mai Tai Mambos
Ferdinand Rudolph von Grofé, known as Ferde Grofé was an American composer, arranger, pianist and instrumentalist. He is best known for his 1931 five-movement tone poem, Grand Canyon Suite.
Arthur Fiedler was an American conductor known for his association with the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops orchestras. With a combination of musicianship and showmanship, he made the Boston Pops one of the best-known orchestras in the United States. Fiedler was sometimes criticized for over-popularizing music, particularly when adapting popular songs or editing portions of the classical repertoire, but he kept performances informal and sometimes self-mocking to attract a bigger audience.
Leslie Thompson Baxter was an American musician and composer. After working as an arranger and composer for swing bands, he developed his own style of easy listening music, known as exotica.
Martin Denny was an American pianist and composer best known as the "father of exotica." In a long career that saw him performing well into the 1980s, 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 an American 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 title 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 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. In the 21st century, the term lounge music may also be used to describe the types of music played in hotels, casinos, supermarkets, several restaurants, and piano bars.
Darla Jean Hood was an American child actress, best known as the leading lady in the Our Gang series from 1935 to 1941. She was born in Leedey, Oklahoma, the only child of music teacher Elizabeth Davner, and James Claude Hood, who worked in a bank.
Haruomi Hosono, sometimes credited as Harry Hosono, is a Japanese musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. He is considered to be one of the most influential musicians in Japanese pop music history, credited with shaping the sound of Japanese pop for decades as well as pop music outside of Japan. He also inspired genres such as city pop and Shibuya-kei, and as leader of Yellow Magic Orchestra, contributed to the development and pioneering of numerous electronic genres.
101 Strings Orchestra was a brand for a highly successful easy listening symphonic music organization, with a discography exceeding 150 albums and a creative lifetime of around 30 years beginning in 1957. 101 Strings had a trademark sound, focusing on melody with a laid-back ambiance most often featuring strings. Their LPs were individualized by the slogan "The Sound of Magnificence", a puffy cloud logo and sepia-toned photo of the orchestra. The 101 Strings orchestra included 124 string instruments, and was conducted by Wilhelm Stephan. The orchestra's famous official photograph was taken in the Musikhalle Hamburg.
"Sweet Leilani" is a song featured in the 1937 film, Waikiki Wedding. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and Bing Crosby's record became one of the biggest hits of 1937.
Space age pop is a subgenre of pop and easy listening music associated with Mexican and American composers and songwriters in the space age of the 1950s and 1960s. It is also called bachelor pad music or lounge music. Space age pop was inspired by the spirit of those times, an optimism based on the strong post-war economy and technology boom, and excitement about humanity's early forays into space. Although there is no exact album, date, or year when the genre was born, producer Irwin Chusid identifies its heyday as "roughly 1954 to 1963—from the dawn of high-fidelity (hi-fi) to the arrival of the Beatles."
Robert Drasnin was an American composer and clarinet player.
Gene Rains is a vibraphonist and leader of the Gene Rains Group, a jazz quartet from Hawaii that played a musical style known as Exotica. Rains' short career spanned the early to the mid-1960s and consisted of 4 LP recordings released on Decca Records and the Vocalion label. These LPs were released during the golden era of Hawaiian and Exotica music and the Tiki culture in the United States. The Gene Rains Group repertoire featured popular Hawaiian and Polynesian Island melodies as well as popular American tunes of the era.
"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.
The Numero Group is an archival record label that creates compilations of previously released music, reissues original albums, and creates album reconstructions from a variety of musical genres. The label, known as Numero, was founded in 2003 by Rob Sevier, Ken Shipley, and Tom Lunt. The label's focus since its 2003 founding has been to research and preserve obscure recorded material and ephemera by artists and entrepreneurs who found little commercial success upon their material's initial release.
Ultra-Lounge is a series of compilation CDs released by Capitol Records, featuring music predominantly from the 1950s and 1960s in genres such as exotica, space age pop, mambo, television theme songs, and lounge. Many of the volumes have since been made available for purchase via digital download.
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.
Polynesian Fantasy is an album by The Out-Islanders released in 1961. The Out Islanders was a one-time combination of many of music industry's leading side men brought together by Billy May, who arranged and conducted the album, and Charlie Barnet, who played saxophone on the album.
Ellingtonia, Vol. Two is a compilation album of phonograph records assembled by Brunswick Records during the American Federation of Musicians strike, cataloguing the famed early recordings of Duke Ellington on Brunswick and Vocalion Records. During the later Swing era, the recordings were praised for accurately predicting the developments in the Big band genre several years in advance.