Liberty 3034
Producer: Sy Waronker
Track listing: Quiet Village / Return to Paradise / Hong Kong Blues / Busy Port / Lotus Land / Similau / Stone / Jungle Flower / Ah Me Furi / Waipo / The Love Dance
June 22, 1959
5 weeks, mono
“Hawaii to me was a laboratory,” says pianist/composer Martin Denny. “I was able to try out new things and if they worked, fine; if they didn’t, I discarded them.” It was in tropical paradise of Hawaii that Denny invented his famed “exotic sounds.”
The New York-born Denny first ventured to Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1954, when he landed a gig playing piano at Don The Beachcomber. By 1955, Denny had formed a trio. Shortly thereafter, he was hired away by industrialist Henry J. Kaiser’s Hawaiian Village complex to headline at the Shell Bar. During that engagement, Denny’s group expanded to a quartet, their popularity blossomed, and he was signed to Liberty Records.
It was only appropriate that Denny and his group recorded their debut album in Honolulu. It took the group just over three hours to cut the entire album at a cost of $850 at the Webley Edwards Studio. “We went overtime 20 minutes and I didn’t have enough money,” he recalls, “but I pleaded with the engineer and he let us finish it.”
All of the material on the album, which featured a unique blend of Asian, Polynesian, and other world music, was perfected by the band in its live set, including “Quiet Village,” Denny’s best-known song. “When I opened the Shell Bar, it had a very exotic setting just outside the room was a pond. There were always these frogs croaking when we played, but when we stopped, they stopped croaking,” says Denny. “One night, as the frogs started croaking, some of the guys in the band started doing bird calls and it broke everyone up in the room.” The following day, one visitor asked Denny to perform the arrangement with the birds and the frogs. “At first I thought he was putting me on, but then I realized he was very serious,” he says.
In the studio, Denny’s band — Arthur Lyman on vibes, John Kramer on string bass, and Augie Colon on percussion — supplied the bird calls, while Denny recreated the sound of the frogs croaking by rubbing a stick over a grooved wooden instrument.
“Quiet Village,” released as a single, became a number four hit. That song, “Stone God,” and “Love Dance” were written by Les Baxter, a former arranger for Nat King Cole. While no other tracks from the album became hits, some did gain notoriety.
“Some time after the album was released I visited Disneyland,” says Denny. “I was waiting outside the Jungle Cruise and I heard this music that sounded vaguely familiar. Suddenly it dawned on me that they were playing ‘Lotus Land.’ Much to my amazement, that song was used by choreographers and even massage parlors.”
Exotica hit the summit of the Best Selling Monophonic LP’s chart in its eighth week. The album’s cover girl, model Sandy Warner, whose face was featured peering out from behind a bamboo curtain, would go on to grace the cover of 10 more of Denny’s albums, but none had the impact of Exotica.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of June 22, 1959
1. Exotica, Martin Denny
2. Gigi, Soundtrack
3. The Music from Peter Gunn, Henry Mancini
4. From the Hungry I, The Kingston Trio
5. Come Dance with Me, Frank Sinatra