Remembering exotica pioneer Juan Garcia Esquivel on his birthday

Remembering composer/arranger and pianist Juan Garcia Esquivel with an interview and some of his recordings. 

Whaddya mean you don't know the Hummingbirds

The Hummingbirds exotica instro double-sider "Space Dance" b/w "Moon Song" was issued on NYC's Panette label. Check it out!

The Hummingbirds

"Space Dance" Listen here: https://archive.org/details/the-hummingbirds-space-dance

"Moon Song" Listen here: https://archive.org/details/the-hummingbirds-moon-song

Dollar Bin Delights: Shadows In The Casbah by Artie Barsamian

Boston-born Artie Barsamian kept the Armenian music of his father alive with records like this 1959 cooker for Kapp Records.

Here's the scoop...

While flipping through dollar-bin cast offs in Toronto recently, I came across a generic looking budget line belly dance two-fer called Navel Maneuvers – geddit – put out by Audio-Fidelity in the mid 70s,  repackaging two of Mohammed El-Bakkar's 60s recordings as a 2LP set. 

The first album on paper-thin vinyl was scratched beyond playability although the second LP, on much heavier wax,  didn't seem to belong with the package. Although it was just as dusty, it had relatively few marks and upon closer examination, the KAPP Records label LP was "Shadows In The Casbah" by Boston's "King of Armenian Swing" Artie Barsamian and His Orchestra. Admittedly, it' s not the greatest record of the genre, and may not be Barsamian's most dazzling display but it's definitely a step up from another torched Mohammed El-Bakkar reissue. 

That the wrong LP jammed in the sleeve was another so-called "belly dance" record was fortuitous – hey, it could've easily been something really shlocky on KAPP by Roger Williams, Jack Jones or Hugo Winterhalter – but not entirely surprising.  For many folks with a passing interest in music from the Middle East, these belly dance records were interchangeable. The name of the fez-wearing character leading the band made no more difference than the nationality of the moustached character playing oud, as long as the music sounded vaguely exotic, that's all that really mattered. Well, that and the sleeve art of course. No doubt a good percentage of these records were sold in the 60s based primarily on cover appeal. 

Artie Barsamian

A Boston-area flooring magnate by day and musician at night, Antranig "Artie" Barsamian was the second-oldest of six children born in South Boston on August 23, 1928 to violinist father Mihran and Antaram Barsamian. Mihran played Armenian folk music exclusively and made sure Artie carried on his dream of keeping Armenian music alive in America with his siblings who performed in Artie's bands and regularly appeared on his recordings throughout his career, albeit uncredited. 

By the time he turned 20, Artie had formed his first six-piece band to perform traditional Armenian music and began releasing rootsy 78 rpm recordings on Gregart Records which he started with his best friend, Gregory Avedikian before switching to Mihran label named in honour of his father. A comprehensive retrospective of Barsamian's early 50s work seems long overdue. 

When Barsamian recorded Shadows In The Casbah, he was already deep into the late 50s exotica era and KAPP probably saw the potential for a relatively low-cost way to cash-in on the current belly-dance album craze circa 1959. 

While the overall after-hours vibe of the album is bit more subdued than Barsamian's self-released earlier recordings – it makes sense that KAPP were trying to appeal to the cocktail crowd – it's still an enjoyable listen showing off the considerable instrumental prowess that the family ensemble developed by playing together over the previous 10 years. 

Now an accomplished bandleader who understood both the requirements of his target audience and the commercial goals of the label execs who signed him, Artie crafted a well-paced set meant to provide a certain otherworldly background ambience for the bachelor pads of the home hi-fi enthusiast rather than to soundtrack a hand-clapping and hip-shaking celebratory event. Thankfully, Barsamian's Shadows In The Casbah eschews the cornball major label notion of adding a Middle Eastern-tweak to contemporary hits of the day and instead focuses primarily on updates of folkloric material in the public domain tastefully chosen and arranged by Artie himself. The resulting album is an entirely schmaltz-free affair which, for a KAPP release of the period, is an impressive achievement in itself. 

Perhaps most notable is Artie's oud-led rip through "Miserlou" which a young guitar-playing fellow South Bostonian of Lebanese descent named Richard Anthony Monsour would transform into a surf rock anthem just three years later after moving to California and changing his name to Dick Dale. While there's no proof that Dick Dale got the idea to rework "Miserlou" in 1962 from Barsamian's version, it's nevertheless possible that the aspiring musician heard it while growing up in the nearby suburb of Quincy, Massachusetts. In any case, Barsamian would go on release 15 albums (including "Minuteman Goes East" where he's decked out like an 18th Century New England militia man with holding a clarinet instead of a musket) as the "King of Armenian Swing" while Dick Dale would become known as the "King of the Surf Guitar" and enjoy international acclaim in 2003 when his version of "Miserlou" got pride of placement in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1. 

You can check out both Artie Barsamian and Dick Dale's versions of "Miserlou" below followed by the complete Shadows In The Casbah and Caravan East albums and a couple of his self-released gems. For further listening, exotica fans should check out Numero Group's excellent Technicolor Paradise compilation from 2018 which features a couple of Barsamian's contributions to the genre. 

LINKS

Armenian Museum of America Artie Barsamian

Happy Birthday Robert Drasnin!

Remembering exotica legend Robert Drasnin on his birthday with three volumes of Voodoo!

Irwin Chusid compiles Sun Ra's Exotica for Modern Harmonic

The beautifully packaged 3-LP and 2-CD Sun Ra collection Exotica is out November 24. 

When music fans think "Exotica," the names that typically come to mind are Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, Les Baxter, Esquivel, and countless others. But Sun Ra?

Here, we offer an illustrative passage from John Szwed's indispensable 1997 Ra biography, Space is the Place. For context, Szwed is chronicling the evolution of Ra's style in the late 1950s, when the budding legend was based in Chicago, leading a midsized ensemble (already dubbed an "Arkestra"), and still working largely in subgenres identifiable as "jazz." Szwed's reflections on Sunny's absorption with Exotica align the Afrofuturist icon with an unlikely musical inspiration:

[quote] "Sunny was listening to the Hollywood-inspired music being made by people like David Rose, whose lush, massed string writing could be heard as theme songs on popular radio programs; or to the exotica of people like Martin Denny, who recorded in Honolulu accompanied by animal noises, natural acoustic delay, and reverberation; and especially to the arrangements of Les Baxter, the premier figure in what was being called mood music.

"Baxter developed a post-swing style in the late forties and early fifties of spectacular orchestral writing, full of timpani and hand drums, tumbling violin lines, harps, flutes, marimbas, celesta, Latin rhythm vamps, the cries of animals, choral moans, and flamboyant singers, creating imaginary soundscapes which he helped evoke with titles like 'Atlantis,' 'Voodoo Dreams,' and 'Pyramid of the Sun.' Sunny first heard Baxter on Perfume Set to Music (1946) and Music Out of the Moon (1947). Baxter went on to produce records which celebrated the Aztecs (The Sacred Idol, 1959), South Asia (Ports of Pleasure, 1957), Africa and the Middle East (Tamboo!, 1955), and the Caribbean (Caribbean Moonlight, 1956), all of which used Latin rhythms generically, as did his two big band records, African Jazz (1958) and Jungle Jazz (1959). Though later generations would understand this music in strictly utilitarian terms, and hear in it the sounds of air conditioning and the clink of ice in cocktail shakers, for Sunny it was music rich with imagination and suggestion. His genius was to take as raw material what others in the 1950s thought of as 'easy listening' and turn it into what in the late 1960s would be heard as 'Third World music' by some and as 'uneasy listening music' by others." [/quote]

Perhaps it's enough to say that Ra and Baxter were both musically omnivorous. However, Baxter, like Sunny, composed music that resisted the Earth's gravitational pull. His 1958 LP Space Escapade contained titles that share a vision with Ra: "Saturday Night on Saturn," "Moonscape," "A Distant Star," "The Other Side of the Moon," and "A Look Back at Earth." His 1947 Music Out of the Moon is arguably the Rosetta Stone of outer space Exotica. Like Sunny, Baxter was an early adopter of the Moog synthesizer—he released the album Moog Rock in 1969, the same year Sunny found himself in Gershon Kingsley's Manhattan studio exploring the circuit-based sounds of the new instrument (featured on tracks he would self-release as My Brother the Wind). And Ra's 1957 debut LP Jazz by Sun Ra included Harry Revel's "Possession," which had first been introduced on Baxter's album Perfume Set to Music.

In a 1996 eulogy for Baxter in Wired magazine, David Toop wrote that "Baxter offered package tours in sound, selling tickets to sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll around some taboo emotions before lunch, view a pagan ceremony, go wild in the sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home hi-fi comforts in the white suburbs."

Was Exotica kitsch? Did it represent "cultural appropriation"? Was it a dilution of indigenous art? Who cares? Music should be enjoyed on its own terms. The Beatles were heavily influenced by American R&B. Ra borrowed from Gershwin and Stan Kenton. Nigerian juju music was radically altered by the infusion of electric guitars and Western rock. This is how styles develop and evolve. Exotica has roots, but those roots are uncopyable. What emerges is something derivative, yet original. Here you have Sun Ra, of African-American extraction, influenced by Les Baxter, a Caucasian from Texas, who was in turn influenced by primitive jungle rites. It's a cultural feedback loop, best enjoyed by leaving politics out of it.



Herman Poole "Sonny" Blount was born in 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama, where racial discrimination was endemic and historic. Music became his solace. During the late 1940s and 1950s he lived on Chicago's South Side, a black racial enclave. It was a culturally vibrant, if economically downtrodden community. Like many of his neighbors, Ra struggled to earn a living and aspired to move on. However, "travel" takes many forms, not all measured in miles. Paul Youngquist, in a chapter entitled "Interplanetary Exotica," from his 2016 book A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism, writes: "One of [Sun Ra's] responses to the confinement of blacks, segregated as they were in Chicago's South Side and other such urban spaces […] involved deploying the cultural rhetoric of the Space Age toward the progressive ends of opening up wider vistas, new horizons. If blacks couldn't flourish in segregated cities, then maybe they could follow exotica into space."

Mainstream Exotica's sensuous dreamscapes underscored middle-class post-war optimism, providing rhapsodies for midcentury moderns. Ra knew the despair of the underclass, and created art that was no less escapist. Music could be transcendent; it could transport the listener. The root word "exotic" implies something strange, something unfamiliar, a place that's — anywhere but here. Maybe you can't afford a cruise to Barbados, but a stylus in a cheap microgroove LP could be a ticket to paradise—or the moon—for 20 minutes.

That Ra hasn't been widely celebrated in Exotica circles is understandable. He never made an "Exotica record"; such tracks are mixed in his LPs alongside space jazz, post-bop, electronic freakouts, and sonic experiments. Another reason: the most acclaimed Exotica LPs were "clean." The labels and producers strived for technical perfection. Ra's catalog—indeed his style—is redolent with wrong notes, indifferent mixes, ad hoc mic placement, ill-tuned instruments, distortion, and dollar-store acoustics. Perfectionism? With Sun Ra, it’s all perfectly flawed. But where it lacks sonic purity, it offers something more gratifying: soul.

Ra is not known for cocktail party accompaniment or Tiki bar soundscapes. But here's a few dozen recordings that might suit the mood.

adapted from the full LP/CD package liner notes by Irwin Chusid

Recordings produced by Sun Ra for Saturn Records, under the business aegis of Alton Abraham
Recorded at various locations in Chicago and New York, 1956–1968

Sun Ra – Exotica (Modern Harmonic)
1. Kingdom of Thunder
2. Space Mates (abridged)
3. Star Bright
4. The Nile (Part 1)
5. Eve
6. Tiny Pyramids
7. The Lady with the Golden Stockings
8. Paradise
9. New Horizons
10. Portrait of the Living Sky
11. India
12. Ancient Aiethopia
13. Planet Earth
14. April in Paris
15. Island in the Sun (complete version)
16. Africa
17. Friendly Galaxy
18. Interstellar Low Ways
19. Conversion of J.P. (abridged)
20. Cha Cha in Outer Space
21. Brazilian Sun
22. Lights on a Satellite
23. Somewhere In Space
24. Spontaneous Simplicity
25. Overtones of China