Marking its 65th anniversary this month is the third studio album from exotic lounge music pioneer, Martin Denny, with Forbidden Island being released in May of 1958. It was recorded in Hollywood at Liberty Studios after Denny’s group had finished a nine month residency as the house band at Don the Beachcomber's Bora Bora Lounge in Hawaii. This was their first album to be recorded without Arthur Lyman, who had left the group to pursue what would become a successful solo career. Along with the usual covers of popular tunes of the day, the album features four original compositions from Denny: "Cobra", "Exotica", "Primitiva", and "Forbidden Island". The album received mostly favorable reviews from critics and Billboard awarded the album four stars writing: "Interesting treatment of exotic original and standards… produced provocative sound. Good off-beat jockey wax." Where some critics maybe didn’t rate the music as “serious”, they at least had to acknowledge the technical perfection of the production and record engineering. Australian critic John Masters wrote in December 1959 that high fidelity addicts may enjoy Denny's "conglomeration of weird and wonderful imitations of tropical rhythms" and opined that, although "most of the content is sugar coated trash, the recorded sound is outstanding and for this reason the disc is commended, as a technical showpiece only, to stereophiles." Personally, it is one of my favorite of Denny’s classic “exotica” albums.
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