But just as important to me is creating music for my audiences to enjoy; that people who consider themselves “tikiphiles” can feel a real connectedness to the music, the tiki culture, and (as you said) that feeling of “the exotic and the mysterious.” Because without the support and enthusiasm of all of them, composing and performing such music would be a moot point.
Archive for the 'WAITIKI' Category
“Sweet Pikake Serenade”
“Sweet Pikake Serenade” is the closing tune on the WAITIKI album, an original that I wrote in memory of exotica’s great vibraphonist, Mr. Arthur Lyman.I did consciously write this song with Mr. Lyman in mind; I tried to imagine myself as a keiki again, watching him play solo vibraphone at Waialae Country Club. And so as I composed, I thought to myself, “Can I imagine Mr. Lyman playing this,” and by keeping that as my intention, I hoped to create something with real authenticity.
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Bwana, Bwana E
“Bwana, Bwana A” is an old Arthur Lyman tune, and quite frankly, the very first exotica recording I ever heard. It opens his album “Music Of Hawaii,” which I think is a CD compilation of his earlier recordings. When I moved to Boston in 1999, my first inclination was to start a Hawaii Club at New England Conservatory, where I was going to school. (Many colleges across the nation have Hawaii Clubs that help transplanted students from Hawaii to network and get settled living on the Mainland). Because I was the only student in the entire conservatory from Hawaii, my Club’s mission was to share and promote traditional Hawaiian culture with those who’d never visited the Islands. Long story short, it worked. Our club at its peak had 458 members (more than half the school).
I was shopping at Tower Records in Boston, looking for Hawaiian music to share with my club members. I stumbled across the Lyman recording and only picked it up because it had a picture of Mr. Lyman as a young man (I’d only known him as an older fellow, since he was a friend of my grandfather’s) wearing polyester pants from the 70s! (On the album cover, Mr. Lyman is the one in the lime green pants with his arm resting on the tiki). Anyways, I popped the CD in my CD player and “Bwana” came on, and I was like “what the hell is this,” so I skipped to the next track, had a similar reaction, and I kept skipping tracks until I reached the end and realized the whole album was filled with these nutty birdcalls and monkey noises and drums and stuff. Because even from all those years growing up and seeing him play, I had only heard him playing ballads and old Hawaiian melodies as a solo vibes player at a posh country club — I had no idea that he had even played with a band, let alone was responsible for the popularity of exotica, etc. I’ve been told since that when Mr. Lyman had his own group, they used to open their shows with “Bwana” – and thus it’s fitting that WAITIKI opens each of its shows with our version, and that we also use the song as the opening for our “Charred Mammal Flesh: Exotic Music for BBQ” album.
A side note: when WAITIKI performs live shows with our dancers, The Waitiki Wahine, the girls come running from either side of the stage and do fast Tahitian dancing during the drum beat in “Bwana.”
No commentsOverarching Creative Approach to WAITIKI
In general, there are three things that are at the very front of my conscience as I work to prepare WAITIKI for performances, and also in the production of our album Charred Mammal Flesh.First, the re-creation of the mystique and feeling of the “unknown” that I think is what really makes the early Denny and Lyman albums shine. From the standpoint of the composer, I think the sense of “unknown” is the result of very well-crafted music that truly incorporates elements from various traditions and forms, but takes these elements out of context; it’s the out-of-contextness that makes listeners feel that they have stumbled across something entirely different, mysterious, and unknown. In other words, that even though the music is a conglomeration of different sounds, there is enough cohesion that things don’t sound random, but also enough improvisation that the connections between these elements doesn’t sound contrived or academic.Secondly, the notion that, when we listen to early exotica, it is as if we are viewing long-lost worlds through what I call “windows of sound.” By nature, the music of exotica is programmatic. Beginning with Les Baxter’s use of song titles like “Quiet Village,” Denny’s “Voodoo Love,” and Kit Ebersbach’s “All Quiet Flows The Don,” listeners may find themselves listening along a suggested agenda. (By contrast, jazz tunes -those without lyrics- often have titles that mean little to the musical nature of the composition, for example Lenny Tristano’s “317 E. 32nd St” or Charlie Parker’s “Anthropology”). In fact, as is the case with Charlie Parker, he would change titles for his songs frequently, and it is known that many of his compositions had multiple titles. That is not the case with the music that I write for WAITIKI — each and every song is tied to a specific story, dream, memory, or other reference that I have in my head. For this very reason, I chose to include blurbs about the tunes in the album liner notes. These blurbs are meant to help suggest scenes for those “windows of sound” that the music is filling – but NOT dictate specific/concrete visual imagery, which I leave to the imaginations of those sipping maitais and listening to the album.
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And thirdly: that with all the thought that goes into my conceptualization of WAITIKI, the issue of main importance is that the AUDIENCE HAS FUN, and that listeners find themselves transported to a distant, imaginary, land — far from whatever tiki bar, concrete city, living room, etc. they are in. Which is one reason why the album has many flavors of the exotic on it: From the classic Denny (”Manila” and “Primativa”) to the twisted (”Satyritar” and “Insomniac Food”), the programmatic (”March of Chief MauMau” and “Fuzzy Mammoth Breath”), to songs that I hope one day may also be considered to be standards of modern exotica (”Cave of Uldo,” “Sweet Pikake Serenade,” and “Dew Drop Inn . . .”), and the others (not to mention everyone’s favorite song about pandas and punctuation, “Pan-XOTIK-Da,” ala the Lynne Truss book); I really hope that folks who have little or no experience with exotica can find something enjoyable. Which is also a reinforcement of my opinion that the exotica genre really does have a multiplicity of entry points, references, and subgenres.