43 PORTS OF PLEASURE: EXOTICA
My music has always been like fiction, no authenticity. I didn’t want to make African music – I only wanted to suggest how African music might sound.
Martin Denny
In 1947, just two decades after the authorities had seen electronically enhanced crooning as a grave threat that could emasculate men and impregnate women, twenty-five-year-old bandleader Les Baxter released Music Out of the Moon, an album that attempted to imagine sounds from another planet altogether. Titles included ‘Celestial Nocturne’ and ‘Mist o’ the Moon’. Baxter was accompanied by Dr Samuel J. Hoffman on a futuristic and eerie instrument called a theremin, which had no keys or strings; its music was literally plucked from the air. Dr Hoffman’s involvement implied that you would have to be a man of science, preferably of the Professor Frink variety, to truly master the theremin. This was highly artificial, rootless music, partly the result of Americans having been briefly acquainted with the farthest-flung corners of the globe in the early 1940s. After World War I, Sophie Tucker’s question had been ‘How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)’; the answer to the same question after World War II would be by creating worlds that could be explored via the gramophone in your living room, fictionalised versions of places – Hawaii, rainforests, outer space – and things that were foreign, historical or hiding just beyond the clouds.
Post-war, there was a desire to make the world more united. It seemed natural at the time that the dream would emanate from New York, capital of the free world. The United Nations briefly offered real hope of making sense of the world, reducing it to gentle signifiers – flags, desks, microphones – in a purpose-built modernist home. If U Thant and Dag Hammarskjöld had got together to make an album in the 1950s, it probably would have sounded a lot like the Buddy Collette Septet’s Polynesia.
Potential apocalypse underpinned America’s turn to human rights-based folk in the 1950s and young Britain’s flirtation with the certainties of aged jazz. Exotica yearned for cartoonish adventure. The strangeness and decidedly un-American scent of the music had been in the air since the ASCAP strike of 1941 let Latin music, Swedish whimsy and Russian folk moans infiltrate the radio. Early sightings of exoticaI came with Vaughn Monroe’s 1950 single ‘Bamboo’, a dense, thick, oppressive sound with the most minimal instrumentation. ‘Nature Boy’’s success had convinced Nat King Cole to be adventurous in his choice of singles, leading to his 1951 single ‘Jet’, a mass of minor chords and gently Middle Eastern percussion, and ‘Hajji Baba (Persian Lament)’ in 1954, which wore its heart on its sleeve.
‘Jet’ was the vocal version of an instrumental from Les Baxter’s 1948 album Perfume Set to Music. Cole’s version, produced by Baxter, wasn’t daring enough to feature the theremin, but it did have the female siren sound that Baxter would make his own and anticipated the Star Trek theme of the 1960s. Baxter was also a fiend for percussion, and he would generally be happier evoking tropical climes rather than the cold dark of space. In 1951 came his landmark Ritual of the Savage LP, which included his calling card, ‘Quiet Village’ – a humid thing, barely a melody at all, that worked entirely on atmosphere and would become a number-two hit in America when it was covered in suitably small, unhurried fashion by Martin Denny.
Capitol’s house arrangers were often allowed to record albums of their own arrangements and compositions. Some were pet projects (Frank de Vol’s A Symphonic Portrait of Jimmy McHugh, 1955), some were surprisingly flat-footed (Nelson Riddle’s Sea of Dreams, 1958), while others were inspired (Gordon Jenkins’s Night Dreams, 1957). Mostly, it was quite obvious that the arrangers didn’t feel the need to put as much energy into these albums as they would for premier acts like Cole, Sinatra, Lee or Stafford. Les Baxter was the exception; he used them as an excuse for all manner of genre-trashing, sonic experiments, daydreams and travelogues. As he had had a number-one single with his version of ‘Unchained Melody’ in 1955, he was allowed to release more than any other arranger.
Bongos pounding under the half-speed sensuality of a cooing siren, harpsichords and finger cymbals defying the rules of time and space… Mostly what I hear in Baxter’s best albums, like Ritual of the Savage (1951), Tamboo! (1955) and Caribbean Moonlight (1956), is shadow – trees in the moonlight, a serene slick of lake, invisible creatures making noises in the darkness. Tales of mystery and imagination. It’s no surprise that Baxter was later asked to score The Pit and the Pendulum.
The best-selling exotica act was Martin Denny, whose albums – Forbidden Island (1958), Hypnotique, Afro-Desia (both 1959) – were, said a wag at Time magazine, ‘labelled like bargain-counter perfumes’. New York-born Denny had picked up a fascination for Latin rhythms when he toured South America with the Don Dean Orchestra in the 1930s. He collected unusual instruments and introduced them into his jazz group, which had regular gigs in the hotels of Waikiki. Denny’s main addition to the Baxter sound was the ‘wild animal’ noises – birdsong, chattering monkeys – that litter his albums, and which had begun by chance when his group were playing in an open-air bar that had a pond full of noisy bullfrogs close by. ‘Some of the boys in the band got carried away and started doing bird calls. The next day someone came up to me and said, “Mr Denny, would you get that arrangement with the birds and the frogs?” I thought, “What is he talking about?” Then I suddenly realised he had a point.’II The noises can get a little wearing over the length of an album, and can sound unpleasantly reminiscent of 1980s student high jinks, but in the ’50s Denny’s albums made Hawaii incredibly fashionable.
Whether it was meant to evoke Hawaii or Burma, the Denny small-group sound rarely changed. ‘My music is all make-believe… it’s what people think the islands might be like,’ he would say. And people heard exotica, erotica, liberation. He was no ethnographer, just a chubby New Yorker with an ear for the unusual, but Denny was partly responsible for the success of the tiki bars that exploded across America, after the Trader Vic’s franchise began spreading outwards from California in 1949.
Not all exotica came in twelve-inch square packages. Caterina Valente’s ‘The Breeze and I’ was a wild and evocative noise on the British and American singles charts in 1955. Quite the polyglot, Valente had been born in 1931 to Italian parents, grew up in Paris and recorded ‘The Breeze and I’ with the Werner Müller orchestra. Her first husband was a German juggler; her second Croydon-born jazz pianist Roy Budd, who would create new sonic worlds of his own with the soundtracks to Get Carter, The Black Windmill and The Internecine Project in the 1970s.
A form of domestic exotica came from Leroy Anderson, a classical pianist and composer who never had the nerve to share his symphonies with the world. Instead, he came up with bite-size work-time novelties like ‘The Syncopated Clock’ and ‘The Typewriter’, which used – yes! – a typewriter as a percussion instrument. There was also ‘Blue Tango’, a huge hit single in 1952; it was an instrumental, but listeners in Britain added their own words to the chorus: ‘I’ve got my woolly woofs on.’ The reason why seems lost to time. And for the homebody, Anderson had ‘The Waltzing Cat’ and the DIY-soundtracking ‘Sandpaper Ballet’. Best of all was ‘Sleigh Ride’, an evergreen Christmas hit which – like nearly all of Anderson’s efforts – was quite utopian in its perkiness.
For the most part, though, exotica was defined by something entirely out of the ordinary. Zither player Anton Karas didn’t know it in 1951, but he was about to change the art of the film soundtrack with his ‘Harry Lime Theme’ from The Third Man, a piece of music that evoked the Viennese underworld and the beginnings of the Cold War with an instrument that was completely alien to Anglo-American pop.
Les Baxter also produced and largely wrote Voice of the Xtabay, the hugely successful first album by Yma Sumac, a Peruvian singer with a five-octave range who could growl or emit a siren wail in a hitherto unknown language. Sumac was such an unlikely figure, her music so unprecedented, that the legend persisted that the whole thing was a gag and she was really a New Jersey housewife called Amy Camus.
The twenty-four-year-old Sumac and her husband, Moisés Vivanco, were hoping to make it as Andean folk musicians when they arrived in New York in 1946. Quite soon, they realised they would do better if they played up to American preconceptions about the exotic. Sumac’s face and voice were attention-grabbing, and seemed all the more so with the addition of Baxter’s Polynesian rhythms and tribal chanting. She was billed as an Incan priestess, wore colourful gowns and casketfuls of Peruvian jewellery and began to sing in a vaguely operatic style. She was even given a part in Secret of the Incas, the 1954 movie that became the inspiration for the Indiana Jones films.III It was about as authentically Peruvian as Groundskeeper Willie is Scottish. It was a shame as, in the long term, all of this artifice obscured the genuinely extraordinary power of Sumac’s voice, the true exoticism of her high notes, and made her seem more of a circus act. Still, the chances are that, without Baxter’s involvement, Sumac and her husband would never have got to Hollywood, would never have sold a million records, and instead would have been stuck playing to a dozen people in Greenwich Village, before flying back to Lima, broke and depressed, in the mid-1950s.
After the exotica boom died down in the early 1960s, Les Baxter moved into movie scores: anything from Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello’s camp classic Beach Blanket Bingo to H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror. There was one exotica classic left in him: 1970’s surprisingly moody and quite beautifully produced Bugaloo in Brazil employed most of the typical Baxter traits that had taken him to quiet villages all around the world. By then, people were familiar enough with the actual sounds of Brazil, but Baxter’s take was a blend of real Brazilian percussion with the dark, the atmospheric and the dissonant. He knew that authenticity was as much of a move as wearing a gaudy paste necklace and claiming regal Incan heritage. There was much fun to be had in artifice. This was pop music, after all.
- I. The term ‘exotica’ probably wasn’t used until 1957, when it was coined by Liberty Records founder Si Waronker, who produced Martin Denny’s album of the same name.
- II. It is also quite likely that Denny was inspired by the bird noises and monkey calls on Ritual of the Savage, the 1951 album by his mentor, Les Baxter.
- III. Depressingly, Sumac’s scenes weren’t filmed in Machu Picchu; they were shot on Hollywood soundstages. The music is credited to her husband Vivanco, but it seems pretty unlikely that Sumac had no input into her performances.