R.I.P. Martin Denny, King of Exotica

March 5, 2005
Martin Denny, 93, Dies; Maestro of Tiki Sound
By BEN SISARIO
NY Times

Martin Denny, the bandleader who mingled easygoing jazz with Polynesian instrumentation and jungle noises to exemplify the "exotica" sound that swept suburban America in the 1950's and 60's, died on Wednesday at his home in Hawaii Kai, near Honolulu. He was 93.

His death was announced by his daughter, Christina Denny.

Born in New York, Mr. Denny toured widely with big bands in the 1930s, served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, and in the mid-50's found himself in Hawaii with an engagement at the Hawaiian Village Hotel at Waikiki.

His group, a quartet that also featured Arthur Lyman on the vibraphone, played around a pool at the hotel in a natural setting, performing soft arrangements of popular songs with an odd instrument or two from Hawaii or places in Asia and the South Pacific. But serendipity added the ingredient that would become Mr. Denny's musical signature.

"One night we were playing this tune and suddenly I became aware that these bullfrogs started to croak: ribbet, ribbet, ribbet," Mr. Denny recalled in an interview. "As a gag, the guys start doing these birdcalls, like a 'meanwhile, back in the jungle' type thing. And everybody cracked up about it. It was just a spoof."

But the gimmick stuck, and soon Mr. Denny and his band began to pepper performances with animal calls and ever-stranger musical instruments, including conch shells, Indonesian and Burmese gongs, Japanese kotos and boobams.

Mr. Denny's recording of Les Baxter's "Quiet Village," a stately piano theme surrounded by crunchy island percussion - an instrumental but for the parade of jungle cries supplied by his band - was released as a single in 1958 and reached the Top 5 of the Billboard pop charts. His first album, "Exotica," with its image of a sultry model of indeterminate ethnicity peeking through a bamboo screen, stayed at No. 1 for five weeks in 1959.

"Exotica" and successive albums with titles like "Forbidden Island," "Afro-Desia" and "Primitiva" provided the soundtrack to the trend for stylized Polynesiana - tiki cups, Hawaiian shirts and the bikini - in the early cold-war era. Like Esquivel, the zany Mexican composer, and Mr. Lyman, who went on to a very successful solo career, Mr. Denny made enterprising use of the new stereo feature of recording technology, which allowed the bongos and birdcalls of the recordings to fill listeners' rooms, and thus more vividly establish the sonic illusion of a restful stop on an innocuously exotic island paradise.

His music, along with that of Esquivel and others, faded in popularity with the spread of rock 'n' roll in the 60's, but found an underground audience in record collectors and fringe musicians, then enjoyed a full-fledged renaissance decades later as kitsch. The pioneering British industrial-music group Throbbing Gristle dedicated its "Greatest Hits" album to Mr. Denny, and through the 90's arty bands like Stereolab, Air, Combustible Edison and Stereo Total mined the exotica era.

Besides his daughter, Mr. Denny's survivors include a sister, Judith Kane, of Sherman Oaks, Calif.

A longtime resident of Hawaii, Mr. Denny continued to perform until shortly before his death, and never stopped promoting the island life and the freedom Hawaii afforded him in making a new kind of music at a safe distance from the capitals of the music business.

"If I had attempted to do this same thing on the mainland and asked a bunch of guys if they'd do birdcalls," he once said in an interview, "they'd have laughed me out of the studio. We did it here and it worked."

I hope to hell this thread does better - ol' Martin deserves to be long-remembered. :hi:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=2716458

He sure will be missed.

Three guys, basically...Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, Les Baxter...and a lot of people who attempted to take what they started and run with it.

In a world of pre-fabricated, lifeless pop music, there will always be a warm spot in my heart for a gang of middle-aged guys banging bongos and yelling out bird calls.

Vaya con Dios, Marty...Vaya con Dios.

:toast:

And Esquivel.

:toast:

He was a little less "tropical" and a little more "outer space," but it was the same general ballpark.

In an era when rock music is the aquarium water in which we all swim, it's quite refreshing to hear great music that owes absolutely nothing to rock and roll.

RIP, Brother Denny! :cry:

He passed away a few years ago, IIRC.

Good stuff with kick-ass cover art! :thumbsup:

I'm a big Martin Denny fan. I'll put some on this afternoon in tribute.

Hey, what'cha gonna do? :shrug:

As a young kid it was one of those songs you could really let your imagination run wild.

Denny, Lyman and Baxter were three great musicians. I still listen to Les Baxter's Unchained Melody. It's a nice change of pace to the Righteous Brothers version.