Vibraphones, flutes and California Latin jazz

I’ve posted extensively about Afro-Latin music in California (here, here, here and here). The subject fascinates me, so I’ll try not to belabor the point too much.

Latin jazz in the post-War Bay Area and Los Angeles was a diffuse, small-scale phenomenon. It’s not entirely accurate to summarize the cities as “scenes” the way one refers to Latin music in New York City as a “scene.” Even so, the West Coast version of Latin jazz had its own sound. If one were pushed to generalize, one might say that it was more atmospheric, less fiery than the East Coast version. Jazzier, if you will. Why the difference? To some degree, it’s a matter of demographics.

At least initially, the West Coast didn’t have the substantial Puerto Rican or Cuban communities to nurture Afro-Latin music, and, consequently, early California Latin jazz experiments were comprised to a greater degree of jazz musicians. East Coast bandleaders like Tito Puente or Eddie Palmieri, on the other hand, had groups with higher ratios of Cubans and Puerto Ricans, musicians who’d grown up playing Afro-Latin music as actual participants in the culture. These New York City groups played Afro-Cuban jazz, or mambo jazz, usually as part of a broader repertoire of guaguanco, cha cha, guajira, son montuno, plena and bomba.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, California society orchestras and Mexican-American bands like Chuy Reyes’ had updated their repertories with fashionable boleros, rumbas and danzones, of course, but their music remained polite - supper club stuff. There was mambo and montuno in the pioneering Mexican-American swing and R&B of the Pachuco Boogie Boys and Lalo Guerrero, too, but only in the most elemental form. Latin jazz in post-War California would largely begin as an import, that is, not an in situ development of the community as
New York City’s Latin jazz was.

The Panamanian-born percussionist Benny Velarde summed up the differences another way in an interview:

“On the East Coast they were playing music that was called “Afro Cuban Jazz”. It was heavily influenced by Chano Pozo who played with Dizzy Gillespie and Mario Bauza. On the West Coast we were playing what was called “Latin Jazz” - which meant jazz standards with Latin percussion …Another difference was that on the East Coast the music was played by Big Bands like those lead by Dizzy Gillespie and Machito. But on the West Coast we did not have Big Bands but the music was played by smaller combos.”

Post-War appearances of Latin jazz pioneers Machito and His Afro-Cubans and the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra (with Chano Pozo) - and later Tito Puente and mambo king Perez Prado - dazzled West Coast audiences. Few in the audience, it seems, would be more greatly affected than jazz musicians. They were a diverse bunch, the early California converts to Afro-Latin music and Latin jazz. Pianist Eddie Cano and vibraphonist Bobby Montez, for example, were Mexican-American, and major draws in Hollywood clubs. White vibraphonist Cal Tjader came from a bop background, and so did black bassist Al McKibbon, though Tjader was basically a native son, and McKibbon arrived from New York City. Percussionist Ricardo Lewis played in some early (and sadly underdocumented) Bay Area Latin jazz combos, and hailed from New Orleans, where he began as a jazz drummer. Like so many others, Los Angeles bandleader Stan Kenton began adding Latin rhythms to his arrangements after a firsthand introduction to the Machito Orchestra. Pianist George Shearing was British, and blind. The list goes on.

The remaining, and most critical, component of early Latin jazz sessions was the seasoned Afro-Latin congueros, bongoceros and timbaleros. Percussionists like Willie Bobo, Mongo Santamaria, Luis Miranda, Benny Velarde, Carlos Vidal, Armando Peraza and Francisco Aguabella had grown up in playing in the tradition. They were masters, and they were indispensable.

Together, at least in Los Angeles, these groups might play huge music ballroom events like the Mambo Jumbo, Joe Garcia’s nights at the Zenda ballroom or Lionel Sesma’s ongoing Latin Holidays at the Hollywood Palladium - events that presented visiting Afro-Latin orchestras.

More often, however, Latin jazz groups traveled along the same circuit of jazz venues, supper clubs and upper-crusty nightspots that jazz combos did, playing places like the Crescendo, the Latin Quarter, Ciro’s, the Garden of Allah and Slapsi Maxi's in Los Angeles and the California Hotel, the Copacabana Club, the Black Hawk, Bop City and the Frisco Club in the Bay Area.

These places fostered a certain dynamic, which brings us finally around to this week’s artists. Jazz players found that an exotic tone poem in the setlist was a clever way to transform a club’s atmosphere, and, additionally, it afforded a certain latitude to explore new sounds, modes, and time signatures. Latin jazz combos, too, found the same experimental freedom in exotica. Certainly it was a great way to put those vibraphones to dramatic effect.

Their audiences didn’t quite get all this, but found it all very diverting nonetheless - long enough to idly consider flute lessons before the last gin and tonic kicked in, at least.

1. Tony Martinez and His Mambo Combo, Pharaoh’s Curse (GNP)
Singer, bandleader, bassist, percussionist and vibraphonist Tony Martinez was an incorrigible showman. He wound up - where else - in television in the late ‘50s, and, for better or worse, those years as Pepino on The Real McCoys will probably be the ones that he’s remembered for.

Martinez’s spotlight flair bore its greatest fruit in music, however. There is drama in his handful of brilliant mambo-jazz 45s from the early- to mid-‘50s - this selection, for instance, as well as previously posted “Ican.” The virtuosic performance with his combo (with Eddie Cano on piano) in 1956’s Rock Around the Clock is pure showmanship.

Tony Martinez was born in 1920 in Puerto Rico. A gifted musician, he studied in San Juan, moving to New York City in the ‘40s to attend Juilliard. He’d form a few groups of his own there, and play bass for pianist Noro Morales, a pioneer of jazzy rumbas. Destined for balmier shores, though, Martinez relocated to Hollywood in the late ‘40s. His combos would be among the first to play the mambo and heavier Afro-Latin material. He was a local phenomenon; by the ‘50s he was a featured act both at upscale Sunset Strip clubs and at huge ballroom events like the Palladium’s Latin Holiday dance nights.

The Pharaoh's Curse (1957). Thanks to the fabulous Bleeding Skull for the screen shots.

Though unusual, especially the organ, this selection - written for the 1957 mummy must-see Pharaoh’s Curse - was not that uncharacteristic of Martinez, who of anyone knew his way around a spooky melody (see “Ican,” again). The movie itself was spearheaded by Bel-Air, an early independent production house known for low-budget ‘50s genre movies, which meant that most of its production values wound up in this selection. Exotica hero Les Baxter wrote this selection, by the way, and provided the rest of the soundtrack. (Note: if anyone’s seen Pharaoh’s Curse, I would love a description.)

This would not be the last of Martinez’s involvement with film industry. He’d been landing small parts in the movies since the late 1940s, and, when offered the role of Pepino Garcia on The Real McCoys in 1957, he accepted. It was a breakthrough role for a Latino on network television, though a highly problematic one - a Puerto Rican playing a Mexican farm hand, and a role scripted with every cliché in the book.

For a time, Martinez’s work was divided between television and music. There would be a good 1960 live album with Eddie Cano and bongo player Jack Constanzo. There would also be The Many Sides of Pepino LP - a sort of novelty-personality album that exploited his stereotyped image - best forgotten except for the storming instrumental “Mandarin Mambo.”

Tony Martinez’s music days wound down, and so did The Real McCoys, finally ending in 1963. Stage and screen occupied the remaining decades of Martinez’s life. He played Sancho Panza in 2,245 performances of Man of La Mancha, according to his obituary, and devoted much of his subsequent energies to creative and executive roles in the Mexican and Puerto Rican film industries.

Tony Martinez passed on in 2002.

2. Pepe Fernandez and His Afro-Cubans, G.I. Rhapsody (Key)
One distinguishing feature of “G.I. Rhapsody” is that it absolutely represents California Latin jazz: flutes, vibraphones, a combination of jazz musicians and Latin percussionists, an exotic port-of-call sensibility.

The other distinguishing feature is a total lack of forthcoming information - great, if you like unresolvable mystery. I identified Pepe Fernandez as a New York bandleader in an early post. This record changes that, of course, but adds little else, despite the musician’s roster on the label. Flautist Bob Messenger was a studio musician who later played winds on Carpenters albums. Wally Snow is a percussionist and vibraphonist who still turns up on Los Angeles sessions. Pianist Amos Trice played on some West and East Coast jazz recordings, mostly in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. These are the best known players here, which says something, and, either way, nowhere else are they credited for their work in the Afro-Cubans.

Key Records was a tiny Hollywood record label, with probably no more than a dozen or two 45 releases from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, mostly country and rock 'n' roll. There were also several long players on Key, notable only in that they were almost entirely anti-Communist screeds, albums with titles like Our Nation’s Pact With the Devil and The Two Fists of Communism. Not to mention 1960’s Rendezvous With Destiny, an album of speeches by then-political-upstart Ronald Reagan. The album’s back cover praises Reagan for his logic, which reminds us just how nutty the Cold War mentality got, though there’d be far worse to come.

“G.I. Rhapsody” was recorded in the early part of 1958. One wonders if its goofy patriotic introduction was a stipulation of the same brainiac who commissioned all of those albums.

3. Manny Duran and Orchestra, Tabu (Fantasy)
Mexican-American jazz pianist Manny Duran grew up in San Francisco playing music with his two brothers - also excellent jazz musicians - guitarist Eddie and bassist Carlos. The three, inspired by the urbane jazz of the wildly popular Nat King Cole Trio, first performed professionally as the Duran Brothers in the late ‘40s, and would continue to play on each others’ records over the coming decades.

Fixtures in San Francisco, the Durans would also play, individually and collectively, with the major names of post-War Bay Area jazz. Foremost among these was vibraphonist Cal Tjader, whose string of ‘50s and ‘60s Latin jazz recordings convened many of the West Coast’s finest Latin jazz and bop musicians, and set the mold for the sound of California Latin jazz. All three Duran brothers would enjoy residencies early on in Tjader’s working combos, with Eddie playing on a Tjader bop session in late ’54, and Manny and Carlos appearing on Tjader Plays Mambo - one of two watershed Latin jazz releases by Tjader, also that same year.

That incarnation of Tjader’s Latin combo dissolved after only a year or two together. But Manny and Carlos, along with Benny Velarde - also from Tjader’s group - would continue as a working unit through 1960, including a long residency at the Copacabana Club. Only two records - this 1960 reading of the exotica warhorse “Taboo” (on the premier Bay Area jazz label Fantasy) and the equally stunning “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Mambo” - came of it. Both were incredibly hip records with everything going for them except sales, which is not the last time you’ll see that around here.

A gifted professional, Manny Duran was like all but only the most fortunate of musicians. He continued to divide his time between Latin jazz and bop, enjoying an active recording and gigging career without becoming any sort of recognizable star, insofar as such is possible in the world of jazz and Latin jazz.

Manny Duran passed away in December 2005.

Incidentally, according to Benny Velarde, Duran assembled the Mambo Devils, one of San Francisco’s first Latin music groups, in the early 1950s.

The sea

The sea. Its mystery and expanse has inspired innumerable poets, writers, artists and musicians throughout the millennia, its endless capacity for beauty and violence has silenced individuals not usually given to speechless wonder.

Cursed, mythologized, prayed to, every seafaring culture has its own tradition of music of the sea, from Vietnamese fishermen’s poem-songs to Irish shanties.

The tradition would renew itself in the strangest ways after World War II, as Americans drew further into the suburbs. Smooth easy-listening themes like Frank Chacksfield’s “Ebb Tide“ and Nat “King” Cole’s “Red Sails in the Sunset” sold in the millions, and they sounded lovely on the new hi-fi, all sumptuous strings and soothing sunset moods. Such productions were but Technicolor fantasia, though - the sea as great make-out spot. If they signaled the extent to which the ocean played a role in Americans’ romantic imagination, they also reminded us the vicissitudes of the sea had become utterly inconsequential to our daily lives. Which of course is how Americans have long preferred our relationship with Nature to stand.

Still, there were some livelier alternatives to the Ray Conniffs and Billy Vaughns. Cocktail jazz exotica, for instance, a beloved sub-genre here at Office Naps. Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny could hardly be described as authentic, and any personal connection to the sea was mostly through the tourist industry, but they made well-known Asian and Polynesian folk songs of the sea a staple of their repertoire, and infused “Beyond the Sea” and “Harbor Lights” with a proper, if kitschy, mystery. There was surf music, too, impressionist music’s final and only stand in American rock ‘n’ roll - “Pipeline” as a sort of Pacific arabesque. Sometimes surf music was made by surfers themselves. It was the spiritual peak of the guitar instrumental form.

There are also this week’s artistes, the instrumental combos who straddled surf music and exotica. They summoned atmosphere every Thursday night, Debussys for the Officers’ Club dance, though one struggles to imagine a greater gulf between Debussy and the Melody Mates. Debussy never had those cool foghorn sound effects, for one.

1. The Melody Mates, Enchantment (Nix)
“Enchantment” would be the second of two Melody Mates 45s. The first, the rockin’ instrumental “Just Plain Guit,” was released on Decca Records in 1959. This gem followed on the tiny Pittsburgh label Nix in 1961. But besides the group’s probable Pittsburgh origins and their members James Testa, Gene Toney and Vladimir Maleckar, little is known about the Melody Mates.

The most fruitful lead here is our narrator, one Nick Cenci, who introduces “Enchantment” with a certain earnestness. From the late ‘50s onwards, Cenci, a Pittsburgh producer and promoter, was involved with much of the city’s teen pop, and many of its indie labels, Nix included.

For thousands of years, the distant blue horizon has called to the restless seaman, and both he and the Melody Mates have shared something of a fundamental understanding. A voyage into the unknown is nothing without its beckoning Shangri-La, and a beckoning Shangri-La is nothing without its wordless falsetto wail. “Enchantment” is a wonderful high camp: it’s got prom magic written all over it.

Alas, “Enchantment” is also an obvious cash-in record. It was identical in concept and atmosphere (including the bell buoys and the lapping waves) to the Islanders’ “Enchanted Sea” (hear excerpt here) a dreamy, seaward instrumental that hit the top-twenty, and had the benefit of doing so in 1959, two years before the Melody Mates plied the same waters.

“Enchantment” was doomed to sink without a trace, and did so, taking the Melody Mates with it. It wouldn’t be last of Nick Cenci. With his business partner - infamous Los Angeles promoter Herb Cohen (who was in town for a few years while credit problems on the West Coast blew over) - Cenci would put together the Co & Ce label in the early ‘60s. It was one of the city’s most successful labels, with a motley assortment of mid-decade Pittsburgh acts - ‘50s-leaning vocal pop from Lou Christie and the Vogues (who had two of Co & Ce’s top ten hits, “You’re the One” and “Five O’Clock World”), pop-rock from the Fenways, and a 45 by wild garage band the Swamp Rats.

Oddly enough, “Enchantment” would be covered note-for-note (including the prologue) by a Los Angeles group called the Castiles a year or two later.

2. Eden Ahbez, Tobago (Del-Fi)
So many terrific stories persist about “Nature Boy” Eden Ahbez - that he was raised in an orphanage, for instance, that he walked across the continent eight times - and so little exists in the way of hard fact, that summoning even the barest sketch of the man is only to repeat those same mythologies. Which perhaps does say something about Ahbez, who America recalls as composer of the standard “Nature Boy.” Ahbez was, if nothing else, a skilled manager of his own mythology.

Consensus is that he was born Alexander Aberle in either 1908 or 1913 to a Jewish Brooklyn family. Adopted in his youth by a small-town family in southeastern Kansas, he grew up as George McGrew, and later, as a young man, he lived for spells in Kansas City and New York City. Certainly he was inclined to the musical arts; there is speculation, especially concerning Ahbez’s New York City years, that he was involved in Yiddish musical theater.

The details begin to coalesce in 1941, when Ahbez arrived in Los Angeles, apparently with hopes of earning a living as a songwriter. He began playing piano at the Eutropheon, a small health food store and raw foods restaurant, one of the earliest of its kind in the states. The Eutropheon was run by John and Vera Richter, German followers of Lebensreform, a fascinating nature-worship and “natural health” movement based in ideals of a temperance and vigorous, natural living, along with stray bits of Eastern spirituality. The movement developed in the industrializing Germany of the late 19th Century, and its ideas spread with German emigration. The Eutropheon - founded in 1917 by the Richters - would become a hub for adherents and image-conscious celebrities alike. Gloria Swanson was an habitué, apparently.

The image and philosophy of this health-obsessed asceticism must have resonated with Ahbez on some level. Thus in Lotusland was Eden Ahbez, Nature Boy, truly born. The Nature Boys - there was actually a whole group of them, including Hollywood health guru Gypsy Boots - were mostly American males taken with the Lebensreform lifestyle, and they were as good at having their pictures as they were at sustaining themselves on raw food and growing their beards long.

The "Nature Boys" in full regalia, Topanga Canyon, 1948. Eden Ahbez is in front. Future California fitness guru Gypsy Boots is back row, left. (Photo from hippy.com, courtesy of Gypsy Boots.)

References to Ahbez as a beatnik and proto-hippie abound. That’s not quite the case, however. Certainly there was their wooly appearance, but the Nature Boys preached temperance, not the radical politics or the sexual and chemical libertarianism of the hippie counterculture. They’re more directly connected to 19th Century Protestant Germany - as well as to the bohemian fringes of California surf culture that followed them. Regardless, the “Nature Boys” were a local phenomenon in the late ‘40s and 1950s. Ahbez, who’d never abandoned his ambition for selling songs, leveraged his unique celebrity, striking up a partnership with Cowboy Jack Patton, a Hollywood radio personality and health nut. Together, they landed the words and melody to Ahbez’s autobiographical “Nature Boy” (part of a larger Nature Boy Suite, apparently) in Nat “King” Cole’s hands. Just as improbably, it became a number one hit, one of the biggest of Cole’s early mainstream singing career. Somehow this all made sense in post-War Southern California.

Though “Nature Boy” was not without its controversies (songwriter Herman Yablakoff sued, alleging that the Eastern melody to "Nature Boy" came from his song "Sveig Mein Härtz"), Ahbez’s celebrity increased to a national level - there were articles in Time, Life and Newsweek magazines. It was a role that did not seem to disagree with him. Ahbez continued publishing and selling his unique songs in Hollywood (including “Lonely Island,” a minor 1959 hit for Sam Cooke), just as the legends proliferated: he and his young wife had once lived for a time beneath the Hollywood sign, his young family foraged for food in the Hollywood hills.

His sole album - 1960 Eden’s Island - is the culmination of both his philosophy and musical career. Released on Bob Keene’s hip Del-Fi label, Eden’s Island capitalizes on Ahbez’s image as the sun-worshipping, beachcombing vegetarian-philosopher. West Coast pianist Paul Moer’s instrumentation was California jazz at its most exotic, with Ahbez - on flute and hand drum - accompanying the soft vibes and Martin Denny-style birdcalls. Even better, Ahbez gently intoned his own poetry over the score. Composed as a “spiritual song cycle,” the poems are idylls of the Nature Boy lifestyle - terribly redolent of Rod McKuen and a certain type of lightweight mysticism. Nonetheless the album is highly original, an absolute high point of American post-War exotica and armchair escapism. (Hear an excerpt of the album's "Full Moon" here.)

Eden’s Island did not sell well in its time, though. And thereafter do the details of Ahbez’s existence grow hazy again. He penned and recorded (usually pseudonymously) a few more obscure 45 recordings in the early ‘60s, he was spotted in a 1967 photograph with the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, and he met with folk boy-wonder Donovan the same year.

There was always something of the showman to Ahbez, part mystic, part beneficent charlatan. To his credit, however, he lived out the life he advocated. Shortly before his death, he was interviewed standing next to the van where he lived, still the long-haired vegetarian, still quoting his own philosophy.

Sadly, Ahbez was struck and killed by an automobile in 1995.

“Tobago,” an instrumental taken from the same session that produced Eden’s Island, only appeared on 45.

3. Bruce Norman Quintet, Keeper of the Sea (Rust)
Should sound familiar. The dirge rhythm, the tremolo guitar, the sound effects, the mysterious communion with the sea. Hardly a triumph of the imagination, but no good concept should be without its repeat visits. Think seafood buffet.

New York City’s Rust Records was the smallish subsidiary of Laurie Records, a pop-oriented indie label, one of the more prolific of its kind during the ‘60s. Rust itself was around for a just few years in the mid-‘60s, its output leaning heavily towards commercial pop. With some discographical triangulation, we can safely identify a 1963 release date for “Keeper of the Sea,” and we can probably assume the group was from the New York or New Jersey area. But further details about Bruce Norman or producer John Brindle must remain, for the moment, speculative.

Naked City Latino

Few of Tinseltown’s directors, writers, cinematographers or creative minds - and certainly none of its soundtrack and television composers - turned a blind eye to opportunism in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Each location or genre came with its familiar set of musical formulas, moods, metaphors and cues. North African epics with their sweeping “Bolero”-style scores, caper movies with their saucy continental themes. And detective movies and crime dramas with their jazz.

The point, and the money, was in indulging audiences’ fantasies, not social realism. In the 1950s, the studios’ hipper soundtrack composers knew a good moment when they saw one. They seized upon the jazz phenomenon, bebop especially. Rippling piano chords registered looming danger. Heart-stopping moments of suspense were followed with lonesome saxophone reveries. Villains' exploits went hand-in-hand with screaming brass as inevitably as dangerous men would just as soon shoot you. Bop was sophisticated and gritty. Bop could be a bit menacing to those only comfortable with Swing-era big bands.

Consider Latin jazz part of the same commercial equation. Sometimes there were mambos done fairly accurately. Henry Mancini’s Touch of Evil was a masterpiece of the crime genre; the Machito Orchestra could have practically played its main theme. More often there were standard crime charts embossed with a spray of rhumba rhythms and Latin percussion. Leith Stevens’ Private Hell 36 had its “Havana Interlude,” Billy May’s Johnny Cool had its “Juan Coolisto,” Warren Barker’s 77 Sunset Strip had its “77 Sunset Strip Cha Cha,” Stanley Wilson’s Music From M Squad had its “Cha-Cha Club” and so forth.

Like bop, Latin jazz was urbane, if not a bit exotic, and Hollywood arrangers and composers plundered the genre and its popular appeal indiscriminately. Tito Puente’s thundering percussion, the cool vibes of Cal Tjader, the after-hours themes of George Shearing: all were colors to paint an impression of the urban jungle. Any time the hero wandered into El Barrio or across the border? Better cue those bongos. It was utter fantasia, of course, the Latin Quarter one more neighborhood in an artfully typecast Gotham.

1. Neil Lewis with his Quintet, Harlem Nocturn (Gee)
The immortal ”Harlem Nocturne” was conceived by Earle Hagen, who, before his prolific Hollywood career, worked as an arranger and trombonist in the big bands of the ‘30s. Hagen was behind loads of memorable soundtracks and television themes - The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, I Spy, Gomer Pyle, The Mod Squad, among others - but his ”Harlem Nocturne,” recorded in 1939 during a stint with the Ray Noble Orchestra, is the source of his enduring fame.

“Harlem Nocturne,” big band success and later R&B instrumental staple, was performed most famously in 1959 by New Jersey’s Viscounts (excerpt here), though hundreds of versions would be committed to record whenever high drama was needed. “Harlem Nocturne” is a crime soundtrack gold standard.

Little seems to be known about Neil Lewis, however, or his fine Latin version of the theme. If names are any indication, Lewis, along with Alfred “Alfredito” Levy and the Harlow brothers, was one of a few non-Latino New York City bandleaders to record in more authentic modes. Lewis recorded a total of four 45s, all released in the mid-‘50s for local labels, all excellent jazzy small-group mambos and cha chas. This would be his second of two 45s on the Gee label, both recorded in 1954.

Lewis’s version is where mood music meets the dissipated side of midnight, its most prominent feature the way it alternates the understated theme with a mambo-driven chorus. Kind of like you alternating whiskey with beer last night. Too bad you drank away all of next month’s rent.

2. Curtis Amy, Bongo Blue (Palomar)
“Bongo Blue” is a sexy blues done by West Coast jazzmen. It’s got style, smoke and atmosphere. It’s got desperate characters nourished on liquor and cinematic cliché. “Bongo Blue” conjures the nightclub tableau that every private eye movie aspires to.

Curtis Amy is one of a select coterie of Texas-born musicians - saxophonists, especially - to distinguish themselves in California’s post-War jazz scene. Born in Houston in 1929, Amy was a clarinetist first and later a saxophonist; after earning a music degree, his early career days would be divided amongst the Army, occasional club gigs and a Tennessee teaching job. Relocating to Los Angeles in 1955, Amy would, after the perfunctory years of R&B and jazz supporting roles, record a half-dozen excellent LPs as a bandleader for the Pacific Jazz record label in the early ‘60s.

Amy and other transplanted Texans - among them James Clay, Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman and the Jazz Crusaders - defied the cliché of post-War California jazz as a refuge of homogeneous cool jazz. He also happened to be very, very good, a musician with an attractively hard tone and a deft way of infusing the blues into sophisticated post-bebop improvisations. In addition to accompanying his wife - singer Merry Clayton - Amy would remain in Los Angeles, teaching music and appearing on pop and rock sessions. His career as a recording bandleader would essentially be finished by the mid-‘60s, however, his six Pacific Jazz LPs forming the bulk of his recorded legacy. And to that end one cliché was upheld: Curtis Amy epitomizes the forgotten jazzman.

“Bongo Blue” is an obscure 45 recorded with some of the then-vanguard of Los Angeles jazz and Latin jazz: Roy Ayers (vibes), Horace Tapscott (piano), John Gray (guitar), Arthur Wright (Fender bass), Henry Franklin (acoustic bass), Moises Obligacion (conga) and Tony Bazley (drums). Curtis Amy also recorded an uninspired album of current pop hits (The Sounds of Broadway, The Sounds of Hollywood) on the obscure Palomar label, but that effort did not include this mid-‘60s gem, which seems only to have seen release on 45 rpm format.

Curtis Amy passed on, sadly, in 2002.

3. The Embers, Peter Gunn Cha Cha (Wynne)
The component parts of crime music - its bombast, jazzy allure and torrid moods - had largely coalesced when Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme” (excerpt here), one of the genre’s signature pieces, blared forth from a nation of tiny television speakers in 1958.

With its instantly identifiable metallic guitar riff and macho swagger, the “Peter Gunn Theme” told us, basically, that justice was something on the move. The Embers’ “Peter Gunn Cha Cha,” from 1959, might have lacked the original’s thrilling audacity, but it told us that justice was not always tireless. Justice liked to take it easy sometimes, too. You know, drop in La Cubana for a plate of ham and cheese croquetas. Emphasis on cheese.

The Embers were a jazzy R&B instrumental group from, I believe, Philadelphia, and released at least one other fine 45 - the exotic “Alexandria” - on Newtime Records. This selection features the redoubtable Candido Camero, a Cuban-born musician whose Latin percussion graced many bop sessions in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

In 1965, Henry Mancini released a Latin-inspired album, The Latin Sound of Henry Mancini, an LP that included his own exoticized take on the theme, "Señor Peter Gunn.”

Outré refugees

Dig a little below the surface and you’ll find in our cumulative 45 rpm output a discography of the strangest musical impulses. Rare were the financial returns great for the independently pressed 45 record but rare was its overhead, either. Its inexpensiveness has made it, since the early ‘50s, the first (and last, often) commercial frontier of America’s idiosyncratic visionaries and of its overlooked, exotic, homespun and most anti-social musical niches. I tend to rhapsodize endlessly about this relationship on Office Naps. Visionaries and musical niches, though: these are forces that redeem American culture.

Such dynamics, the subtle balance of economic and creative energies, were still going strong in the mid and late ‘60s. The 45 was still the predominant format in much of popular music, including rock ‘n’ roll - though not for much longer - and examples of unconventional 45 records were just as ample, if not more ample, in 1968 as they were in 1958. It’s simply that, of the unusual or nominally experimental records that were issued commercially, they were then more likely to be the work of rock musicians, psychedelic individualists like Syd Barrett and Roky Erickson and the Holy Modal Rounders. In the guise of psychedelia, their freakishness would even perversely capture a fleeting commercial potential.

That’s what’s different about the selections this week, all recorded and released in the mid- and late ‘60s, the psychedelic era. They are likely strange by most listeners’ standards. Nonetheless they are neither rock nor psychedelic. They seem to be from some different moment, like beatnik artifacts washed up in a later decade. Their anomaly only seems to increase the profundity of their strangeness.

1. Kali Bahlu, Lonely Teardrops (Terra)
The enigmatic Kali Bahlu was a young woman in 1967 when she released her Cosmic Remembrance LP on the then-foundering World-Pacific record label. A swirling tableau of gongs, sitars, tablas and Bahlu’s Buddhist chanting and fairy-tale ruminations, Cosmic Remembrance is an album known for its general incongruity and for testing listeners’ patience. For all of its faux-Eastern artifice and Bahlu’s voice - sometimes a feral soprano, sometimes a jarring, child-like babble - Cosmic Remembrance is nonetheless quite unique, a relic that stands apart from its era. (Hear an excerpt of the album’s “A Cosmic Telephone Call” here).

“Lonely Teardrops” - Bahlu’s first recording, I believe - is not wholly dissimilar from the otherworldly atmosphere of her Cosmic Remembrance LP. It’s just much better. It’s also Kali Bahlu singing from some grimmer place. The ominous rumblings, Bahlu’s naked, if indecipherable, emotion, the wonderfully stark gloom: those of us drawn to sunless, wintry tundras find much to love in the remarkable “Lonely Teardrops.” This is the reason bears hibernate. Brighter days lay ahead for Kali Bahlu, however - they could hardly get any bleaker.

Whether it was the Bahlu of “Lonely Teardrops” banging on a detuned guitar - or the beatific Bahlu rambling in sing-song tones about Lord Buddha and “clocks of never” on Cosmic Remembrance - this is clearly someone on a separate psychic plane. Often referred to as acid-influenced, that is perhaps a disservice to the peculiar experience of Kali Bahlu, whose Californian, pseudo-Buddhist cosmic consciousness just happened to synchronize with hippie sensibilities.

Kali Bahlu would later be involved in some capacity with a few hens-teeth-obscure ‘70s albums of Eastern-inspired singing and commune vibes by the Los Angeles hippie-rock group Lite Storm. Bizarrely, Bahlu was more recently spotted in Taiwanese filmmaker Mei-Juin Chen’s film Hollywood Hotel.

I’ve found no conclusive information on Terra Records or this selection’s producer, Michael O’Shanessey. I believe “Lonely Teardrops” was recorded in 1966 or 1967.

2. George Loa and Maui Loa (Little Brother), Polynesian Chant of Green Creation: Cosmic Climax (Green Power)
The brothers Loa, this week’s mystery artists.

This is Hawaiian cosmology reinvented for a headier moment in history. The flute and conga drum channel grooviness. Same for the sexual overtones of the selection’s spoken-word introduction and title. The haunting call-and-response chanting seems authentic enough, but whether or not it was a pre-coital dance of the Polynesian gods is anyone’s guess.

There’s nothing one can definitively point out as either a precedent or an obvious target audience for 1969’s “Cosmic Climax. “ One might have found it being sold from ads in the back of a Stag magazine or peddled to shell-bar tourists. It might have been handed to you at last summer’s gathering of the tribe. Whoa, thanks man. But let’s not mistake the 45 rpm record for a medium that demands market analysis or committed commercial vision. It can be many visions all at once. It can be a great mass of anthropologically incorrect, conflicting intentions.

“Cosmic Climax” was recorded in Hawaii or possibly Los Angeles.

3. Miriam, Catwalk (Tanqueray)
“Catwalk” is the handiwork of the Hollywood actress Miriam Byrd-Nethery and her husband Clu Gulager, an actor, too, and later an aspiring filmmaker.

Miriam Byrd-Nethery (born 1929 in Arkansas) and Clu Gulager (born a year earlier in Oklahoma) met in the theater department at Baylor University, married and found their first professional theater and television work in New York City. Relocating to Hollywood in the late ‘50s, Gulager would go on to distinguish himself as a prolific genre actor in both movies and television, including deputy sheriff Emmett Ryker in TV’s The Virginian, rig-hand-and-ladies-man Abilene in The Last Picture Show and contract killer Lee in The Killers. Starting with 1985’s Return of the Living Dead, Gulager’s work as horror movie stock character revived an acting career that continues today, albeit at a subdued pace.

Miriam, too, managed her own small-time acting career in Hollywood, but if it was Gulager who enjoyed the spotlight, theirs would first be a marriage, then family, energized above all by a spirit of collaboration and the noblest of artistic endeavors: filmmaking. Their obsession with producing films - including the family’s eight years in Tulsa trying unsuccessfully to realize their grisly serial killer horror noir Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! (its saga detailed in an engrossing 1997 LA Weekly article) - put them on the brink of starvation.

None of this does anything but increase the charm of this maverick and quintessentially American couple, whose lust for creative, budget-minded expression reached early fruition on “Catwalk,” a slice of pure Sunset Strip eccentricity from 1967. Ever wonder what really goes inside the actors studio? This is it.

Miriam Byrd-Nethery passed away in 2003.

Surf exotica

If it was the instrumental that kept rock ‘n’ roll simmering in the murky years between its ‘50s inception and arrival of the British Invasion in 1963, then surf music would be the instrumental’s final, most colorful efflorescence.

Excited by classy, guitar-based instrumental hits like the Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run”, Duane Eddy’s “Movin’ and Groovin’” and the Fireballs’ “Bulldog,” American teenagers everywhere - Southern California included - began forming their own hard-driving instrumental combos in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Some regions would develop their own subtle variations of instrumental rock ‘n’ roll - none, however, as distinct as the Pacific Coast’s. The booming reverberation, the propulsive thrust, the “moody” minor keys and the vibrato guitar accents of early regional hits like the Gamblers’ "Moon Dawg!" (1960), the Revels’ "Church Key" (1960), and the Belairs’ "Mr. Moto" (1961) were the stylistic elements which captured Southern Californian youth’s vision, if not experience, of their own sun-and-surf predilections. Just a year later, numbers like Dick Dale’s “Let’s Go Trippin’” and the Tornadoes’ “Bustin’ Surfboards” embodied surf music in all of its formalized glory, a new aesthetic forged from ringing Fender guitars, sunshine and arcane surfer references. Surf music was like some tanned, grinning evolution of the whole instrumental genre. Peculiarly adapted to beaches and teen clubs, it came crawling from the primordial Pacific waters to capture America’s Kennedy-era consciousness.

Surf music, though clearly something new, nonetheless shared certain characteristics with an unlikely older cousin: exotica. The overlap is especially apparent with a cocktail jazz combo like Martin Denny’s or Arthur Lyman’s. Before vocal harmonies began dominating surf music, both styles were obviously instrumental, and both styles' adherents occasionally dipped into the same bag of exotic standards like “The Breeze and I,” “Miserlou,” “Quiet Village” and “Istanbul.”

The most significant shared characteristic, though, is that both surf and exotica music sought to summon sensation through sheer atmospherics. The surf groups, with their staccato guitar runs and crashing drums, preoccupied themselves with the dizzying rush of the wild surf. Exotica’s proponents knew that the real action was back on shore, casually dressed and safely settled around the kalua pig at Luau Village, but there would be plenty of moments when surf music crossed, even if inadvertently, into exotica’s tropical waters. Read on.

1. The Blazers, Bangalore (Acree)
The Blazers were a brief-lived Fullerton, California surf group. Their “Bangalore” was the second of two excellent instrumental surf 45s, their first, 1963’s “Beaver Patrol,” was banned, according to legend, from local radio airplay due to its title’s innuendo. Both of the Blazers’ 45s would be released in 1963 on Acree Records, a tiny label formed by Vern Acree, Sr., a professional country and western guitarist and the father of the Blazers’ lead guitarist.

The Blazers’ two singles were recorded at the legendary Downey Records, a small studio located in the back of a record store in Downey, California. Part recording studio, part record store, part record label, Downey Records was the sort of sympathetic, independent operation at the foundation of any thriving regional rock ‘n’ roll scene.

On “Bangalore,” the Blazers themselves - lead guitarist Vern Acree, Jr., rhythm guitarists Steve Morris and Wayne Bouchard, saxophonist Larry Robins, drummer Chris Holguin and bassist John Morris - voyage to the east, completely on their own fabricated terms, and pay homage to Dick Dale’s influential “Miserlou,” surf music’s best-known exotica anthem.

In 1962, surf music was thriving, but it was still largely a phenomenon particular to Southern California. The young Beach Boys would have their first local hit, “Surfin’,” that year. Same for the Marketts’ “Surfer’s Stomp” and Tornadoes’ “Bustin’ Surfboards,” early recordings that directly referenced the lifestyle in their titles. Fender’s all-important standalone reverb unit for its electric guitars had just been introduced. By 1963, however, even the record industry’s major labels, for all of their erratic beneficence, sensed something was afoot, and so did a national consciousness taken with the fantasy of sun, fun and the opposite sex that surf music offered. Providence would smile and a national spotlight would shine, however briefly, upon groups like the Surfaris (“Wipe Out”) and the Chantays (“Pipeline”).

Such would not be the fortune of the Blazers, alas, nor the vast majority of their surf-inclined brethren. They’d play the same high school dances and armory hall teen shows for the next year or two until high school graduation or the British Invasion rendered the whole genre obsolete.

2. The Surfmen, Paradise Cove (Titan)
Composed of Ray Hunt (lead guitar), Nick Drury (rhythm guitar), Armon Frank (sax), Randall Anglin (bass) and Tim Fitzpatrick (drums), the Surfmen were integral to the Southern California instrumental surf music phenomenon from its very inception. The Surfmen grew out of the Expressos, a young group from the Orange County suburbs who issued one 45, “Teenage Express” - with its flipside “Wondering,” an early version of “Paradise Cove” - on the local Trans-American label in 1960. Changing their name, the Surfmen would record and release a handful of 45s on Titan Records before finally metamorphosing, late in 1962, into the Lively Ones, one of surf music’s finest combos.

“Paradise Cove” and its flipside “Ghost Hop” would be the first of the Surfmen’s three 45s, all recorded in 1962. While not quite the deadly thoroughbreds that the Lively Ones were, the Surfmen’s atmospherics and echoing guitar sound captured the spirit, if not the sound, of the nascent surf instrumental.

Paradise Cove is a real place, actually, a formerly popular surfing spot near Malibu. Like Tahiti, Tehran, Thailand or any subject matter popular in exotica music’s geography, the song’s locale is invested with fanciful measures of mystery and intrigue. The real Paradise Cove was a place you went to surf. The song “Paradise Cove” - one of a number of solitary meditations like the Beach Boys’ “The Lonely Sea,” the Essex’s “Pray for Surf” or the Sandals’ “Theme From the Endless Summer” - was nothing you’d want to paddle across. Mostly it was a place for sunset communion and prayers to Poseidon for perfectly cylindrical waves. Dense, savory musical atmosphere was the mission here. Not reality.

3. The Pharos, Pintor (Del-Fi)
Aspiring jazz-musician-turned-entrepreneur Bob Keane formed, after some initial tribulations in Los Angeles’s independent record industry, his Del-Fi Records label in 1957. Ritchie Valen’s Latin-tinged rock ‘n’ roll put Keane’s fledgling label decisively on the map with hits like “Donna” and “La Bamba.” While Del-Fi’s succeeding years served post-War California with a fascinating body of teen rock and pop, exotica, Latin jazz and instrumental novelties, by 1963 - the genre’s apotheosis year - surf music would be the label’s bread and butter, sleek, reverb-heavy productions its specialty. To scan the Del-Fi Records album discography is to scan some of surf’s archetypal instrumental groups: the Lively Ones, the Sentinals, the Impacts, Dave Myers and the Surftones. Perusing the label’s 45 discography, on the other hand, is chasing rainbows. The Gonzos? The Moongooners? The Centavos, anyone?

Add the Pharos to that list. Except that it was almost certainly from 1963, no one anywhere seems to have anything to say about either the group or their songwriter Jack Irvin, but I won’t belabor the folly of further speculation. Just say that “Pintor” makes up one of surf music’s more endearing legacies, an ephemeral streak tinged loosely by the Spanish fandango. The Sentinals did it with “Latin’ia,” the Trashmen with their “Malaguena.” What is the sound of wishful thinking? “Pintor,” of course, the music of the Iberian Peninsula transformed into blonde-haired, blue-eyed, sun-crazy fantasia.

Vocal group exotica

A post-War vocal harmony group like the Flamingos could summon angels with a haunting ballad like “I Only Have Eyes For You.” So why not, with a bit of tweaking, conjure the reverie of the faraway jungle isles as well? And so it would be, the Billy Wards reaching for the vaporous high notes of “Pagan Love Song” or the Platters crooning “Harbor Lights.” Vocal group exotica essentially was easy-listening and instrumental exotica transposed to a more human scale, its yearning for mysterious, faraway continents transposed to yearning for that unattainable love - the next block over, across the sea, it didn’t matter.

The effect was similar, but the music was somewhat different. Groups who’d first harmonized together in the theaters, nightclubs, school hallways, churches and street corners of post-War America necessarily availed themselves of simpler mechanisms than the dark swells of Les Baxter’s orchestra or Martin Denny’s shimmering vibraphone tones. Here the otherworldly atmospherics were accomplished with soaring, ethereal harmonies and layers of crude studio echo.

Here there were lyrics, too - vocal groups were after all entertainers, not just purveyors of mood music and jungle tone poems. From the Cleftones (“Red Sails in the Sunset”) and the Avalons (“Ebb Tide”) to the Four Jokers (“Beyond the Reef”) and the Cardinals (“Misirlou”), always the theme was love, and always the love was lost, departed or unrequited. If instrumental exotica records obviated travel for the armchair fantasist, then vocal groups obviated exotica’s very instrumentation, their spectral falsettos jungle passion enough for any lovelorn soul by his turntable.

1. The Charades, Flamingo (Skylark)
The Charades’ brief history was intertwined with that of Billy Storm, a longtime Los Angeles vocalist noted for a solo hit, 1959’s teen ballad “I’ve Come of Age,” as well as for his earlier involvement with the Valiants, an R&B group who’d scored with 1957's “This Is the Night.” It was Storm who co-produced and sang lead on this 1964 version of Edmund Anderson and Theodore Grouya’s enduring “Flamingo.” This would be the most memorable of several obscure Charades singles recorded between Storm’s ongoing commitments as a solo singer and as a member of local groups the Nuggets and the Electras.

This is music for Valium eaters, a hypnotic, slower-than-sunset reading of “Flamingo.” That’s not the distant surf you hear, that’s the gurgling sound of you, fallen asleep to Love Boat reruns.

Billy Storm continued recording into the early ‘70s, always with somewhat marginal success. His later endeavors would include the gospel-pop supergroup the Brothers and Sisters of Los Angeles (with their 1969 album Dylan’s Gospel), as well as the psychedelized soul group Africa (with 1968’s Music From ‘Lil Brown’).

2. The Passions, Jungle Drums (Audicon)
The Passions were like Dion and the Belmonts, Vito & the Salutations, the Mystics or any number of other New York City-area harmonizers, the very model of the white street-corner vocal group. From Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, one of vocal groupdom’s fertile crescents, the guys first formed as the Sinceres, coalescing shortly thereafter with the revamped line-up of Jimmy Gallagher (lead), Tony Armato (first tenor), Albee Gallone (second tenor) and Vinnie Acierno (baritone) and a new name, the Passions.

The group scored a minor hit with their first record “Just to Be With You” on A&R veteran Sol Winkler’s Audicon label in 1959, but the returns would mostly be diminishing from that point onwards. This 1960 version of Ernesto Lecuona’s exotica warhorse “Jungle Drums” was the b-side of their third Audicon single. Its a-side, an iteration of the oft-covered Leon Rene vocal number “Gloria,” seems especially well-regarded among doo-wop fans. Personally speaking, however, I find “Jungle Drums” the Passions' most compelling recording. I know what you’re thinking, and I agree: most white doo-wop is pretty corny, but the Four Seasons never had these booming blasts of slide guitar.

After five 45 releases on Audicon, the Passions went on to record for a number of labels, including Diamond, Jubilee, Octavia and ABC, all in a similar style, all without much luck. The Passions finally called it quits in 1963.

3. The 4 Most, The Breeze and I (Relic)
An obscure New Jersey group, the 4 Most’s members Bobby Moore (lead), Ronald Mikes (tenor), Charlie Chambers (baritone) and Bobby Frazier (bass) first formed in Newark in the late ‘50s. They rehearsed, they hustled, they found a sympathetic manager, they played a few high-profile gigs at the Apollo Theatre and elsewhere, they built a local following. And they released single 45 record on a tiny local record label, too: the group’s version of yet another Lecuona chestnut, “Andalucia” (later known as “The Breeze and I,” with 1941 English lyrics by songwriter Al Stillman). Issued on local record impresario Joe Flis’s Milo label, “The Breeze and I” would be a resounding flop when released in 1960. It would also be the 4 Most’s only release - at least initially. Their story no more remarkable than any of the era’s other vocal groups, the 4 Most dissolved the next year.

Oddly, though, “The Breeze and I” (and its flipside “I Love You”) would be released again, on a separate occasion, just three years later. Its second issue in 1963 on Relic Records - an early collector label devoted to vocal group reissues - netted significant local recognition. Enough recognition, in fact, that Bobby Moore, who had recorded in intervening years with the Fiestas as well as under the name Little Bobby Moore, reconvened the 4 Most in 1964. A few more 45s by the group would be recorded and scattered though the mid-‘60s. Again, it was all to be without much success. Bobby Moore sang with Duke Anderson’s big band in the ‘60s, remaining more or less inactive since.

But back to this selection. In a theme common to exotica lyrics, some third party - a flamingo, the jungle drums, the breeze - assumes the role of messenger among separated lovers. And, in a theme common to doo-wop, the lyrics of “The Breeze and I” are subsumed by its vocal pyrotechnics, the lead tenor personally taking the role of “the Breeze.” This is the baritone’s eternal lament. Why does the romantic lead always go to the tenor? Why do the tenors always get to play the part of the breeze? Fuck you tenors!

Cinema funky

Just as its antecedents in the mid-‘60s had their sitar interludes and fuzztone atmospherics, the hipper cinema of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s oozed with wah-wah guitars, jazz basslines and funky backbeats. And why not? Whatever Tinseltown's machinations, film had long been a dramatic and stylish medium, and its soundtrack composers were some of the coolest talents around. Movie and television scores afforded lucrative opportunities for a Lalo Schifrin or Henry Mancini to satisfy some serious interests in jazz and composition, if not to experiment with riffs from psychedelic rock or dark rhythms from funk.

Before funk became an obligatory element of every post-Shaft blaxploitation picture, though, before it became a cliché on primetime television fare like CHiPs, there were this week’s selections. Some of these were written for movies. Some of them weren’t written for the screen but wound up there. Some of these were versions of soundtrack themes that exceeded the original. At one end of town, circa 1970, there were serious young men with serious pedigrees from music conservatories sitting in studios with handfuls of annotated charts. At the other end of town, the poorer part of town, churning funk music spun out in endless iterations. And, in that planetary stretch in between, these selections happened.

1. Roy Budd, Carter (DJM)
Roy Budd was a British musical prodigy who began his professional career as a jazz pianist at the tender age of sixteen. It would be his later soundtrack work for movies like Kidnapped (1971) and The Wild Geese (1978), however, for which Budd would find his lasting fame.

Budd imparted a chilly minimalism to “Carter,” his theme for 1971’s Get Carter, a British thriller starring Michael Caine. One can run down the possibilities all day and still never account for how Budd managed, with only a motley ensemble of bass, Indian tablas, and electric harpsichord and piano, to create a tableau so perfectly redolent of both the stark landscape of northern England and of the gangsters who went shooting about there with characteristic disregard.

Budd passed on in 1993. He was forty-six.

2. Julio Gutierrez, Last Tango in Paris (Vico)
The great Julio Gutierrez emigrated from his native Cuba in the late ‘50s, pursuing his calling in both Miami and New York City with freelance stints as a composer, session pianist and musical director. Despite two very hip ‘60s Latin jazz LPs, Progressive Latin and Havana B.C., Gutierrez would never regain the stature he’d enjoyed in Cuba, where, in addition to leading the legendary Cuban Jam Sessions series, he’d been among his country’s best known modern bandleaders and composers.

1972 would perhaps represent the crowning year for the pornographic movie in its brief-lived moment of mainstream chic, and few soundtrack themes would better encapsulate its adults-only art-house cachet than Argentinean saxophonist Gato Barbieri’s “Last Tango in Paris.” 1972 would also mark one of the final years of Gutierrez’s recording career, but if his would hereafter be one of diminishing visibility, it wasn’t for lack of audacity. Other Latin bandleaders like Mongo Santamaria, Willie Rosario and Tito Puente would tackle Barbieri’s continental boudoir anthem, but no one else would inject it with the same groovily psychedelic flair.

Gutierrez died in New York City in 1990.

3. The Johnny Harris Orchestra, Footprints On the Moon (Warner Brothers)
British-born Johnny Harris first made a name for himself in the mid-‘60s writing arrangements for pop singers like Petula Clark and Jackie Trent. Later in the decade, Harris would produce and arrange sessions for Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdink, Shirley Bassey and other pop acts including the Flirtations. His career arc would also include turns in the late ‘60s touring with Tom Jones and serving as musical director for British singer Lulu’s brief-lived variety show Happening For Lulu.

We are not discussing a serious jazzbo or renegade experimentalist here. Harris’s, rather, was a professional kind of hip, a kind that distinguished itself as a turtleneck-and-beads-wearing young talent in the somewhat staid end of the British pop studio system.

While an ear attuned to the latest in the pop charts meant getting served with unenviable tasks like resuscitating Paul Anka’s career, it also afforded its share of fringe benefits. Like John Schroeder, Harris would release a handful of LPs and 45s under his own name. Albums like 1970’s Movements were uneven affairs, certainly, with polite, state-of-the-art covers of “Light My Fire” and “Give Peace a Chance” along with some more adventurous moments like the funky “Fragments of Fear,” “Stepping Stones” and this selection.

Inspired by the Apollo moon landings and subsequently used for the British ITV Network coverage of NASA’s lunar missions, “Footprints on the Moon” follows in the great tradition of Les Baxter’s Space Escapade or Dick Hyman and Mary Mayo’s Moon Gas, albums where the moon’s surface was imagined more as luminescent lovers’ playground than science's new frontier. Each reverberating piano note of “Footprints on the Moon” seems to bring the listener one gravity-defying step closer to their astrological love destiny. Careful, Libra, your love investments will soon pay off, but watch for a calculating Capricorn to step across your earth shadow.

Since 1972 Johnny Harris has lived in Los Angeles, working mostly in television composition, most famously for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Wonder Woman.

(Thanks go to this site for much of the information on Johnny Harris.)

Office Naps Middle Eastern Mix

The third installment of the Office Naps mix, and it’s all over the place. From Turkish wah-wah guitars and ’60s garage ragas to Yusef Lateef’s Mecca-wise wail, it’s Middle Eastern only in the loosest possible sense of the term. If there ever there was a darbuka to be struck or an argol to be wrangled, however, it’s probably in there. Enjoy.

-DJ Little Danny

Office Naps Middle Eastern Mix

Rosko With The John Berberian Ensemble, Perfection (Music and Gibran: A Contemporary Interpretation Of the Author Of The Prophet, Verve Forecast)
Charles Kynard & Buddy Collette, Blue Sands (Warm Winds, World-Pacific)
The Freak Scene, Grok! (Psychedelic Psoul, Columbia)
Elias Rahbani, Dance of Maria (Mosaic of the Orient, EMI)
Fifty Foot Hose, Opus 777 (Cauldron, Limelight)
Mohamed "Mike" Hegazi and His Golden Guitar, Nouni (Belly Dance With Zeina, Emi)
The Off-Set, Xanthia (Lisa) (7”, Jubilee)
Lloyd Miller with the Press Keys Quartet, Gol-E Gandom (Oriental Jazz, East-West)
Fairuz, Yalla Tenam Rima (Bint El-Harass, soundtrack, Parlophone)
Istanbul Calgicilari, Sax Gazel (Disco Fasil I, Bip!)
T. Swift & The Electric Bag, Free Form In 6 (Are You Experienced, Custom)
1st Century, Looking Down (7”, Capitol)
Don Randi Trio, Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver Jazz, Reprise)
The Kaleidoscope, Pulsating Dream (Side Trips, Epic)
Omar Khorshid and His Guitar, Guitar El Chark (Rhythms From the Orient, Voice of Lebanon)
Ozel Turkbas, Bovzovkia Solo (Dance Into Your Sultan's Heart, Elay)
The Devil's Anvil, Hala Laya (7”, Columbia)
Ganimian & His Oriental Music, Swingin' The Blues (Come With Me To the Casbah, Atco)
Okay Temiz, East Breeze (Drummer of Two Worlds, Finnadar)
Clyde Borly & His Percussions, Afromania (Music In 5 Dimensions, Atco)
Sabah with Chahine's International Orchestra, Hully Gully (Halli Galli Dabka) (Music From a Millionaire's Playground, Parlophone)
Yusef Lateef, Sister Mamie (Live at Pep's, Impulse!)
The Rotary Connection, I Took A Ride (Caravan) (Rotary Connection, Cadet Concept)
Dorothy Ashby, Soul Vibrations (Afro-Harping, Cadet)
Herbie Mann, Incense (Impressions of the Middle East, Atlantic)
Lalo Schifrin, The Snake's Dance (Lalo = Brilliance: The Piano of Lalo Schifrin, Roulette)
Tony Martinez and His Mambo Combo, Pharoah's Curse (7”, GNP)
Johnny Lewis Trio and Millie, Snake Hips (7”, Coral)
Sonny Lester & His Orchestra, Song of India (Little Egypt Presents More How To Belly-Dance For Your Husband, Roulette)

Struck wordless

You’d occasionally spot them on easy-listening records of the ‘50s and ‘60s, those theremin-throated songbirds, their voices swooning, wailing and wordlessly calling with celestial llllaaaahhhhhhhhs.

I’m talking, of course, about wordless vocalists. It is a bit like birdwatching, actually. Jungle exotica, easy-listening themes for outer space, atmospheric soundtrack pieces, and easy orchestral confections: these were their native habitats. They were sometimes heard clustered in groups, more often they were to be spotted crooning by themselves, their voices coloratura hovering somewhere between the South Pacific and the Crab Nebula. A primarily female phenomenon, wordless vocals were a sort of musical stand-in for the feminine mystique. Adaptable enough to conjure anything from seductive playmate and tropical siren to green-tinted moon maiden, wordless vocals relied on their musical context for their meaning.

There were a few albums that featured the wordless vocalist as a headlining star and soloist, but releases like Mary Mayo’s Street of Dreams (1953) and Leda Annest’s Portrait of Leda (1958) were extremely rare. Mostly the wordless vocalists were talented studio and background singers like Marni Nixon, Patricia (aka Petula) Clark, Loulie Jean Norman and the aforementioned Mayo.

Jackie Gleason used them, as did Les Baxter and Juan Esquivel. And so did this week’s artists. As is sometimes the case with Office Naps, the selections are joined by a shared musical device rather than their participation in any musical movement or fringe-dwelling sub-genre. This week’s selections were the phenomenon of independent minds thinking alike, mostly, but the net effect of was basically the same: instrumental music transformed into space-age reverie.

1. Yusef Lateef, Titoro (Riverside)
The pre-‘70s discography of multi-instrumentalist Yusef Lateef is one of jazz’s most fascinating and otherworldly. Born in Detroit, and long identified with that city’s post-War jazz scene, Lateef grew up playing tenor saxophone; his early musical apprenticeship would culminate with a stint in Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop orchestra of the late ‘40s. Studies in composition and flute followed, and when Lateef’s own recording career as a leader began in 1957, his eastward proclivities were already intact. The next ten years would produce a singular body of work on jazz labels like Savoy, Riverside, New Jazz, and Impulse.

Yusef Lateef could, and did, play straight ahead with the best of jazz’s heavyweights. It’s his Eastern-themed albums and compositions, however, which represent his most interesting work. From Lateef’s earliest dates, albums like Jazz and the Sounds of Nature, Prayer to the East, Eastern Sounds, Jazz ‘Round the World showcased an interest in African, Asian, and, most importantly, Middle Eastern music. Compositions like “Iqbal” and “Mahaba” were, at the time, essentially unique, the reedman’s unabashed exoticism matched only by his acquisitive tastes in unorthodox solo instruments. In addition to being one of era’s most respected jazz flautists, Lateef blew bassoon and oboe. He blew shenhai and argol, too, with a muezzin’s fervor. He even blew theremin (“Sound Wave” on 1966’s A Flat, G Flat and C).

Though always well regarded by his peers, Lateef is, even today, rarely championed by jazz’s critical and historical establishment. It’s no fault of their own, I suppose, but they have long confused exotic with kitschy.

Perhaps critical reception was the reason why this 1961 version of Billy Taylor’s “Titoro” (which was cut during the sessions for Lateef’s The Centaur and the Phoenix album) was only released on 45 in its day. “Titoro”’s vision of jazz is more Afro-Latin exotica than serious bop, more Playboy than Downbeat.

After a late ‘60s switch to Atlantic Records, Lateef’s records were marketed to a younger audience with great crossover success but less originality. Yusef Lateef is today long retired from the commercial record business. At the age of eighty-six, he has remained very productive, inspiringly so, dividing his time between academia, composition and his own record label, YAL.

2. Rita Moss, Daydream (Rozell)
A Los Angeles-based pianist and singer, Rita Moss began her recording career as a pop and jazz soloist in the mid-‘50s, but would release material only sporadically thereafter. She was pictured on her first album (1956’s forgotten Introducing Rita Moss) singing while simultaneously playing, one hand on each, piano and bongos. A later stretch at Los Angeles-based Dot Records produced three late ‘60s albums with Moss singing in lusher orchestrated pop territory. It would be Moss’s sung theme to 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby (her vocals are heard only in the movie, I believe) and a smallish cult hit the same year, “Just a Dream Ago,” that represent her lasting claim to fame.

Then there is this obscurity, likely recorded in the early ‘60s, and produced in Hollywood, mood machine to the world. “Daydream” is as much blank canvas as it is Ellington standard. Dusky reverie? Beachfront siesta? Anonymous guestroom rendezvous? “Daydream” was any of these, really, a vessel for whatever shadowy phantasm or narcotic vision we wanted to project upon it. That is mood music.

3. Big Jox Orchestra, Cut-A-Loose (Valencia) What “Cut-A-Loose” lacks in refined musicianship, it makes up for with beatnik insouciance. There but for the grace of wordless vocals go thee: this might have been just another sloppy jazz 45.

With infamous producer and record impresario Leo Austell’s writer credit here - as well as the city’s characteristic rough honking saxophone sound - it can be reasonably adduced that “Cut-A-Loose” was recorded in Chicago. Otherwise, we’re dealing here with a mystery group, a group that will, I suspect, always remain so, no matter how many times we google “big” and “jox” together over the coming decades.

Everything about “Cut-A-Loose” suggests an early- to mid-‘60s release. Again, total speculation.

Song of the Jungle

Vocal exotica never quite carved out the discrete cultural niche that its more popular instrumental sister did in the ‘50s and ‘60s. A popular singer might toss the occasional “Bali Hai,” “Moon of Manakoora” or “Caravan” into the mix, but rarely did exotica a singer make.

Not so for instrumental orchestra and band leaders like Les Baxter, Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman: their jungle fantasia sold by the million, and they did so with dozens of album-length variations on the same eternal themes. Theirs were mood pieces, with quintessential numbers like “Quiet Village,” “Taboo” and “Hypnotique” unfailingly conjuring atmosphere, intrigue and faraway latitudes. Put on Martin Denny’s Afro-Desia LP and you might be setting forth on safari one track (“Simba”), fighting off sleeping sickness the next (“Tsetse Fly”), and all of it, even the parasites, was there for your escapist pleasure.

America’s post-War popular singers conjured moods and places, too. But they relayed and interpreted themes and emotions as well, relating stories and relating, in the process, to their audience. A Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee or Sarah Vaughan sought to engage rather than merely hypnotize. This demanded a broader songbook than just grass shack paeans and meditations on tropical love.

If at all, it was torch singers like Julie London, Julie Wilson and Jeri Southern who best realized a combination of undiluted ambience and real lyrical content. For every slowly drawn syllable that Julie London breathed out, a listener breathed in equal measures of perfume and Sobranie cigarette smoke atmosphere. London and company’s songbooks, too, were based around love, mysterious and lost. Rarely did they sing about the tropics, though.

Still, plenty of vocalists did have their exotic moments, even if it was just a worn chestnut like “Jungle Drums.” Popular singers like Vic Damone (Strange Enchantment), Bing Crosby (Return to Paradise Islands) and Frank Sinatra (Come Fly With Me) made travelogue-style albums with some nominally exotic themes. With assistance from Martin Denny, obscure singers like Sondi Sodsai and Ethel Azama made full-length exotica records. Their vocal records might transport you to a South Seas paradise, just not in quite the same way that a jazzy instrumental tone poem and your living room Barcalounger could. Their records transport you to a nightclub that looked a lot like that South Seas paradise.

That said, I can’t promise that this week’s selections will transport you really even that far. They’re showing Paradise, Hawaiian Style later tonight on TV. That might be a better place to start.

1. Don Sargent and the Buddies, Voodoo Kiss (Catalina)
A teen-oriented rock ‘n’ roll singer from California, we know Don Sargent from a handful of obscure 45s from the late ‘50s, but, other than that, there’s very little to go on. It’s easy to imagine Sargent as a sort of a Ricky Nelson-type, though, a good-looking guy with a perfectly white smile, a pleasant voice, and a dad who worked in the film industry, the guy who always played the older brother’s best friend on television. The senior class treasurer, maybe.

Somewhere in that chasm between white bred American wholesomeness on one hand and sadomasochistic energy on the other throbs the irrepressible, kinky heart of “Voodoo Kiss.” That’s the beauty of this selection: it’s pure American product.

“Voodoo Kiss” was recorded in 1959 for the tiny Catalina label based in Los Angeles.

2. Darla Hood and the Fabulous Modesto Orchestra, My “Quiet Village” (Ray Note)
Darla Hood was a cast member on The Little Rascals, director Hal Roach’s wildly successful series of comedy shorts that surveyed the exploits of a pack of plucky pipsqueaks. The show began in the early ‘20s as Our Gang and soldiered on into the mid-‘40s under various auspices, with ever renewed supplies of rascals. The original series was syndicated for television finally in the ‘50s under its better-known moniker The Little Rascals.

From mid-‘30s onwards, Darla Hood was one of the show’s featured characters, playing herself, basically, from age four to age ten. After Our Gang, she continued to make singing and acting appearances, sustaining a show business career with better luck, if nothing else, than most of her former colleagues.

Hood’s 1959 vocal version of Les Baxter’s exotica standard “Quiet Village” was recorded at the seasoned Hollywood age of twenty-eight. It’s pretty much what you’d expect any Little Rascal to sound like after a few decades at the margins of the spotlight: bigger, brassier, the original Mel Leven lyric drained of its subtle obsessiveness and replaced with searing vibrato.

3. Paul Leader and H.B. Barnum’s Circats, Devils Pad (Tropical Isle)
Every nightclub singer in the business must find his voice. Ideally, with refinement, finesse, and experience, a voice develops into a tool of personal expression and style. A tenor like Frank Sinatra, for instance, was capable of sophisticated emotional nuance and immediacy. Nat King Cole’s velvety baritone and unruffled interpretations mellowed the harried listener. Dean Martin’s croon was all boozy, detached charm and effortless cool.

Hope springs eternal, and so does misery. Around every overwrought emotion, grunt, and foaming-at-the-mouth bit of lunacy on “Devils Pad,” there seems to lurk a late child support payment. Women are perpetually the death of a guy like Paul Leader, and so, alas, are booze, horse racing, and cheap cologne.

This seems to have been Leader’s only record, with a Latin combo assembled for the occasion by the rising West Coast studio man H.B. Barnum. Both were obviously at critical stages in their lives when “Devils Pad” was recorded, circa 1963. Barnum would go on to an extraordinarily successful career in Los Angeles as a freelance jazz, pop, and soul producer and arranger, and, later, as a television composer. Our friend Leader would go on to his third divorce, mostly.

There’s much to love about “Devils Pad,” and it’s all there, in his voice.

Fabu-Les

If the West has impulsively exoticized the non-West for centuries now, then the brilliant Los Angeles arranger and composer Les Baxter was the great twentieth century pop music proponent of this impulse. A staff arranger and conductor for the young Capitol Records in the late 1940s, Baxter distinguished himself early on with 1948’s Music Out of the Moon, a lunar-themed pop suite for chorus and Theremin. A few years later, Baxter’s seminal “Quiet Village” (click for excerpt) was a commercial success as well, with the LP from which “Quiet Village” was taken, 1952’s Ritual of the Savage (subtitled Le Sacre du Sauvage, for added ethnographic impact), inaugurating and essentially defining the post-War American form of exotica.

Baxter went on to release dozens of exotica albums; they shifted with eerie, wordless choral arrangements, they swelled and pulsed with lush string sections and jazzy passages. There were the compositions with titles like “Jungle River Boat,” “Voodoo Dreams,” and “Oasis of Dakhla,” and then there were the Asian instruments and Afro-Latin rhythms and chants and wordless wails which populated these compositions; all of them appropriated freely from indigenous traditions and Baxter’s imagination.

At least initially, his success may have tapped into some lingering South Pacific nostalgia from World War II. Ultimately, though, it was that