Tangents, Pure Exotica: As Dug By Lux and Ivy

You might well ask yourself why I am reviewing a compilation of Exotica here in the jazz department, a genre that spanned the fifties through to the mid-sixties, and which could be just as easily be termed ‘easy listening’? Well, aside from the fact that this generous Cherry Red collection, Pure Exotica: As Dug By Lux and Ivy is great fun to listen to, and contains some light jazz in amongst the tracks, it also touches upon many of the musical currents that ran parallel to, and inevitably influenced, jazz during that incredibly creative era. No music exists in a vacuum, and many of the ‘exotica’ musicians heard on this collection had their roots in the swing band era of the thirties and forties, and many were virtuoso players in their own right.

The roots of Exotica stem from the end of World War II, when thousands of American veterans returned home from service in the South Pacific, telling tales of the exotic lands and cultures that they had experienced: the people, the foods, the colours, and the music. It was obviously an idealised vision of the East, no doubt stoked by the comparatively drab suburban landscape they came back to, but it started a fascination with Polynesian, Hawaiian, and ‘oriental’ (as it was termed at the time) cultures in general, which was soon reflected in clothing, architecture and of course, music. ‘Exotica’ was a term coined for music that took (or as we might say today, appropriated) Latin, African, and Polynesian rhythms, faux tribal-sounding chanting or singing, bird-calls and field recordings, and fused it with the popular light music of the day. Prior to the birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, ‘pop’ music consisted primarily of orchestral arrangements of popular songs, typically sung by the era’s star vocalists, but there was also a growing market for purely instrumental ‘mood’ music, as epitomized by Mantovani, with his novel ‘cascading strings’ sound.

In 1951 Les Baxter, a former singer and sax player in Mel Tormé’s touring band, found himself working for Capitol Records, writing arrangements and conducting orchestras for Nat King Cole, Bob Eberly, and Frank Sinatra. One of the perks of the job was that labels would allow arrangers to use the studios out-of-hours to record their own music on the side, which led to Baxter recording his first album, Music Out of the Moon, the first record to feature the spacey sounds of the theremin. This found some success, but it was Baxter’s second album, Ritual of the Savage, that would become a cornerstone of the Exotica genre, combining lush orchestral arrangements with tribal rhythms and atmospheric noises, and featuring such classics as ‘Quiet Village’, and ‘Stone God’. This compilation gives us three Baxter tracks, and if one needed a single track to best demonstrate Exotica I’d probably plump for ‘Dawn Under The Sea’, a particularly surreal example of Baxter’s craft. Mixing eerie electric organ with fairly adventurous string arrangements, some jarring passages for vibraphone with solo flute floating above, it’s a bizarre confection, actually closer in spirit to the avant-garde jazz that Sun Ra was making in the same period (and similarly experimenting with the latest electric organs), than any of the mainstream easy listening of the day.

Although Baxter made the first Exotica recordings in the US, the movement’s spiritual home was Hawaii, positioned as it is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, equidistant between America and Asia, and exemplified by the music of pianist Martin Denny and his protégé, vibraphonist Arthur Lyman. As a young man Denny had toured South America for four years in the thirties, sparking in him a fascination with Latin rhythms, and a penchant for collecting exotic instruments. Invited to Honolulu for a two-week engagement in 1954, Denny stayed on and formed his own group (which included Lyman), becoming the house band at the Shell Bar in the Hawaiian Village Hotel. Unashamedly describing the music they made as ‘window dressing, a background’, in certain respects they were making proto-ambient music, which could either be ignored or listened to, depending on how many cocktails had been consumed by the hotel’s guest. Although individual albums by Denny and Lyman could get a bit repetitive, the functionality of the music has ultimately served the recordings well, and seventy years later they still sound fresh. Denny’s version of ‘Bali Hai’, which opens the first disc, is quite stark in its division between vibraphone on the left channel and percussion on the right, with an ominous conch occasionally sounding above it all. Arthur Lyman’s wind-chime drenched ‘Moon Over a Ruined Castle’ isn’t far removed from the Modern Jazz Quartet’s Django in style or substance. Many of these recordings were used as HiFi demonstration discs, and the sound quality is nearly always vivid, with fantastic separation between the chants and percussion.

The two discs are neatly titled ‘Exotica Lite’ and ‘Exotica Dark’, with the mood music for your space-age bachelor pad located on the Lite disc, and the more experimental (and dare I say, more pretentious) music on the ‘Dark’ disc. Part of what makes Exotica so fascinating is its magpie approach to a bunch of different strands in music at the time; there’s the influence of jazz, especially the Cubano bop of Dizzy Gillespie’s big band; there are traces of Stravinsky and the Neoclassical school (If it’s cod-classical music you’re after look no further than the wholesale Rite of Spring rip-off Les Baxter’s ‘Despair’), beat poetry, the experimentation with electronic music found in science fiction soundtracks, as well as the influence of Rock’n’Roll. Originally compiled by Lux Interior and Poison Ivy, founder members of the punk-rockabilly group The Cramps, the fact that Pure Exotica manages to touch upon so many of these different strands gives it the edge over similarly packaged compilations. There is even a handful of pukka jazz artists included here, with tracks from Stan Kenton, Phil Moore, and Henry Mancini, but the bizarro highlight has to be Buddy Collette’s genuinely unsettling ‘Polynesian Suite’. A series of imaginative jazz interludes, often no more than a few bars long, they are interjected with preposterously earnest pseudo-mystical narration by the actor (and later convicted murderer) Robert Sorrels; it’s a true one-of-a-kind experiment, and just one of many reason to give this enjoyable compilation a try.