Tiki culture is American art, music, and entertainment inspired by Oceanian art, Caribbean art, and art of the east Pacific. Influential cultures include Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, the Caribbean Islands, and Hawaii. Despite spanning over 10,000 miles and including many different unrelated cultures, religions, and languages, Tiki aesthetic is amalgamated into one "fantasia of trans-Pacific cultures."
Leslie Thompson "Les" 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.
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 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.
Yma Sumac (; was a Peruvian-American coloratura soprano. She was one of the most famous exponents of exotica music during the 1950s.
Jungle Cruise, formally named Jungle River Cruise, is a riverboat amusement ride located in the Adventureland themed section at various Disney theme parks worldwide. The attraction is a simulated riverboat cruise that travels along a waterway using a concealed guidance system through areas with Asian, African, and South American themes. Park guests board replica steam launches from a 1930s British explorers' lodge, and Audio-Animatronic jungle animals are displayed throughout the ride. A live Disney cast member acts as a tour guide and boat skipper that loosely follows a rehearsed script, providing passengers with a comedic narrative.
Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of The Beach Boys is a greatest hits album of the American rock band the Beach Boys, released on June 10, 2003 by Capitol Records. This collection is the most comprehensive single-disc compilation ever issued of their music, with 30 tracks totaling over 76 minutes and including nearly every U.S. Top 40 hit of their career, except for "The Little Girl I Once Knew" (1965) and "It's OK" (1976).
"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".
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.
Heart is a studio album by French singer Amanda Lear, first released in 2001 by Le Marais Prod.
"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 Complete Bob Marley & the Wailers 1967–1972 is a series of compilation albums by Bob Marley and the Wailers released in eleven volumes by JAD Records between 1997 and 2002.
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.
Wesley Tyler Glass, known professionally as Wheezy, is an American record producer and songwriter. He has worked with artists such as Lil Baby, Future, Gunna, Young Thug, Nav, Lil Uzi Vert, 21 Savage, Bankroll Mafia, Trippie Redd, Rich the Kid, Meek Mill, among others.
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.
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.
Technicolor Paradise: Rhum Rhapsodies & Other Exotic Delights is a 2018 compilation album of exotica music released by music label The Numero Group.
Jewels of the Sea is a 1961 orchestral exotica album by American composer Les Baxter. The album was inspired by fantasy ideas of the ocean from pop culture, such as mermaids and sea nymphs, sunken ships, and legendary underwater cities like Atlantis. There was an overall erotic element to the album, whose tagline was "Titillating Orchestrations for Listening and Loving", and whose original cover featured actress and model Diane Webber smiling glamorously underwater, apparently naked. Although not explicitly shown wearing a mermaid tail, her makeup and jewellery are styled to be reminiscent of the performing mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs.
