I’ve been thinking a bunch about what made Denny, Lyman, and Colon bands from Hawaii particularly successful; what was it about those guys that captured the spirit and essence of exotica? Previous posts to this blog, as well as conversations at forums like TikiCentral.com and The Fraternal Order of Moai often point out obvious characteristics: “light” Latin rhythms, a collective view of paradise and the exotique, easily digestible improvisation, catchy compositions whose forms focus on melodic paraphrase for development, etc.

What I’ve learned from my own work with WAITIKI, and from listening to other so-called exotica bands of the era that didn’t originate from Hawaii, is that the addition of Latin percussion to a vibraphone quartet does not an exotica band make.

What no one has really touched on, myself included, is that the cultural/lifestyle background of the players in those bands—that is, growing up as kama’aina in Hawai’i— not only taught them the things mentioned above, but also engrained in them cultural music that Westerns perceived as exotic.

For example, stuff like tinikling or bon dance, which doesn’t appear on the Mainland anywhere mainstream unless you go to ethnic enclaves like Filipinotown or a Japanese cultural event, are actually pretty mainstream when you’re growing up in Hawaii.

So if you’re a musician in an exotica band, and the bandleader (say Martin Denny) says “alright boys, I need this one to have percussion that sounds like tinikling“, fuck, you’re all set! The fun of playing just became way more fun, because how funny is it to play tinikling in a jazz band? But probably, Denny didn’t have those ideas. He was a haole who moved to Hawai’i in 1954. Denny came with a lot of musical prowress, imagination, and a sense of Latin music, but not with all the ‘local’ influences that kama’aina grow up with. No: my guess is that he’d rehearse the band, with Lyman, Colon, Harold Chang, and others, and it was the local boys that came up with all the cool stuff!

If we accept the above, then the quest becomes understanding what was popular, what was hip, what was ‘normal,’ what was everyday music for people in Hawaii at that time, and for professional musicians in Hawaii at that time. The next posts in this series will look deeper into contextual music of wartime Hawaii, and will (tentatively) examine music using the following recordings or musicians:

Club Nisei Orchestra - Japanese Music of Old Hawaii

Gabby “Pops” Pahinui - Slack Key Guitar

(more to come)

Stay tuned…

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.”