Juan García Esquivel, often known mononymously as Esquivel!, was a Mexican band leader, pianist, and composer for television and films. He is recognized today as one of the foremost exponents of a sophisticated style of largely instrumental music that combines elements of lounge music and jazz with Latin flavors. Esquivel is sometimes called "The King of Space Age Pop" and "The Busby Berkeley of Cocktail Music", and is considered one of the foremost exponents of a style of late 1950s-early 1960s quirky instrumental pop that became known as "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music".
Easy listening is a popular music genre and radio format that was most popular during the 1950s to 1970s. It is related to middle-of-the-road (MOR) music and encompasses instrumental recordings of standards, hit songs, non-rock vocals and instrumental covers of selected popular rock songs. It mostly concentrates on music that pre-dates the rock and roll era, characteristically on music from the 1940s and 1950s. It was differentiated from the mostly instrumental beautiful music format by its variety of styles, including a percentage of vocals, arrangements and tempos to fit various parts of the broadcast day.
Elva Ruby Miller, who recorded under the name Mrs. Miller, was an American singer who gained some fame in the 1960s for her series of shrill and off-tempo renditions of popular songs such as "Moon River", "Monday, Monday", "A Lover's Concerto" and "Downtown". An untrained mezzo-soprano, she sang in a heavy, vibrato-laden style; according to Irving Wallace, David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace in The Book of Lists 2, Miller's voice was compared to the sound of "roaches scurrying across a trash can lid."
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.
Richard Cheese & Lounge Against The Machine is a cover band and comedy act, performing popular songs in a lounge/swing style. Lounge singer Richard Cheese is a character created and portrayed by Los Angeles-based actor/comedian/singer Mark Jonathan Davis.
Jaymz Bee and the Royal Jelly Orchestra is a Canadian lounge music and jazz band formed in Toronto. This group of about a dozen musicians, led by Bee released eight albums of cover versions of well-known songs, reinterpreted for performance in cocktail lounges.
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.
William Lorenzo Bunt, known professionally as Dean Elliott, was an American television and film composer.
Space age pop or bachelor pad music is a subgenre of easy listening or lounge music associated with American and Mexican composers, songwriters, and bandleaders in the Space Age of the 1950s and 1960s. It drew on contemporary fascination with technology, outer space, and "exotic" locations, exploiting new audio technology such as stereophonic sound, multitrack recording, and early electronic instruments. Irwin Chusid identifies the heyday of the genre as "roughly 1954 to 1963—from the dawn of high-fidelity (hi-fi) to the arrival of the Beatles." Major artists in the genre include Juan García Esquivel, Les Baxter, Enoch Light, Henry Mancini, Dick Hyman, and Jean-Jacques Perrey.
Ferrante & Teicher were a duo of American pianists known for their clever arrangements of familiar classical pieces, movie soundtracks, and show tunes, as well as their signature style of florid, intricate, and fast-paced piano playing performances.
"Love Is Just Around the Corner" is a popular song with music by Lewis E. Gensler and lyrics by Leo Robin, published in 1934. It was introduced in the 1934 Bing Crosby film Here is My Heart and was also included in the 1935 film Millions in the Air.
Simon Hugh Zentner was an American jazz trombonist and big-band leader.
The Tango Saloon is an Australian experimental tango band from Sydney, Australia. Their self-titled debut, a "tango-flavored album with a twist of spaghetti western", was released in 2006 by Ipecac Recordings, the American record label run by Mike Patton and Greg Werckman. It was described by Greg Prato of AllMusic as "a musical breath of fresh air in the often foul-smelling state of modern popular music". Three albums have followed, Transylvania (2008), Shadows & Fog (2012) and Suspicion (2015) featuring vocalist Elana Stone. In June 2007, the band was seen supporting Ipecac label-mates Peeping Tom on the East-coast leg of their Australian tour. Other notable performances include support for Mondo Cane at Sydney Festival 2012, and for Marc Ribot in 2015.
Leon "Chaino" Johnson, the self-styled "percussion genius of Africa," was an American bongo player. After touring for several years on the Chitlin' Circuit, he released several albums and became popular with listeners of exotica music in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the promotion of his albums, a fictional biography was developed, depicting Chaino as an orphan from a lost tribe in central Africa who had been rescued by a missionary after his tribe had been massacred. Chaino was actually born in Philadelphia and raised in Chicago.
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.
Robert Vernor Hammack, Jr. was an American musician, originally from Texas, whose principal instrument was jazz piano. He led a prolific career in Los Angeles as a pianist, organist, conductor, arranger, and composer in (i) live venues, (ii) broadcast studios for radio and television, and (iii) recording studios for records, radio, television, and film. Hammack flourished in a wide spectrum of genres that included dixieland, Blues, swing, sweet dance music (e.g., Lawrence Welk), easy listening, gospel, liturgical jazz, musical theatre, Tin Pan Alley, classical, and film score.
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.
Cherry Capri is an American pop-culture figure, author and performance artist whose work explores Mid Century Modern style, healthy homemaking, and manners. She has been called "a mix between Martha Stewart and Pee Wee Herman." She has also been called "America's Mistress of Modernism, Manners & Mirth."
