One thing that’s always been at the forefront of my thoughts, when listening to Les Baxter’s Le Sacre du Sauvage album or some of the early Denny albums, is how concise yet seemingly mystic the writing and orchestration are. Let’s start with the big picture first: It is rare to find a track as “long” as 4 minutes — in fact, most hover between 2-3 minutes, barely going over 3 minutes. Even Baxter’s movement “Ecstasy,” part of the multi-movement work “The Passions” is just a 6 or so minutes. Yet each tune acts as a microcosm of a larger sonic world. How is it that, within just a few minutes, we can glimpse so much landscape but not be confused by how each aural event relates— not just in accordance to each other, but also in terms of the larger landscape … and title of the piece?

By the time Baxter was on the scene, the notion of orchestral programmatic music was nothing new. Symphonists as early as Haydn were already experimenting with writing music that would evoke imagery and metaphor. Famous non-vocal program music includes Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (the Pastorale), Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, practically all of Richard Strauss’s tone poems, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps and Firebird suite.

Each of the pieces I just named are multi-movement works, where each movement is at least 6-7 minutes long, if not an average of 10-15 minutes each. Yes, symphonic forms (i.e. sonata-allegro, sonata-rondo, scherzo-trio, theme & variations, etc.) are intended to provide much room for composers to develop their ideas, and hence end up being relationally longer in duration … but even taking that into account, the sheer amount of multi-movement programmatic works, where each movement is a “miniature” is fairly rare.

In comparison, by and large we are privileged to see inside Baxter’s head for just a few minutes, yet are treated to fully developed musical ideas that envelop our imaginations, but conclude almost just as soon as they’ve started. In these cases, Baxter’s compositional and (presumed) notational style follows the same lineage of late Romantic and Impressionist ethnomusicologist-composers (i.e. Béla Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly), in that all parts (even those that seem improvised or aleatoric) are fully notated: devoid of note improvisation, unlike that of smaller bands/combos led by jazz contemporaries. (Fellow exoticologist/tiki historian/friend Jeff Chenault’s comment on my “Postmodernism” post notes that Plas Johnson was allowed to do some improvising on Baxter’s “African Jazz” album).

My favorite of Baxter’s pieces that I feel are representational of these qualities are “Jungle River Boat”, “The Feathered Serpent of the Aztecs” (which coincidentally starts with a theme similar to Berlioz’s dies irae subject from “Symphonie Fantastique”), “Coronation”, and “Jungle Flower.”