MARTIN DENNY - FORBIDDEN ISLAND @ 65

 

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.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - MARTIN DENNY, EXOTICA

As a child of the 1960s, I was privy to sampling the golden age of easy listening music, courtesy of my parent's record collection. My mom was the primary collector in the house, but my dad had his favorites too and while mom favored the likes of Elvis and Johnny Cash, my dad was more drawn to the exotica realm, sometimes with Polynesian influences, but more often with Latin & Mexican flair. Though this music was well represented in our home, I don't recall any Martin Denny albums on the shelf.

It wasn't until 1984 that I was finally turned on to Denny and his "Exotica" albums. This happened squarely because of my interest in Industrial music, principally that of Throbbing Gristle. TG had been proponents of the work of Denny for some time, playing his music after their live shows and dedicating albums to him as well as doing stunningly convincing parodies of his infamous LP covers. This was a long time before the 1990s revival of the whole genre of "bachelor pad, space-age, exotic & easy listening" music.

Back then, collecting Denny recordings was only doable when you could find them in second hand bins in record shops and thrift stores. Mostly they were in pretty rough shape, so you'd be lucky to find one that wasn't beat up too badly. At first, putting them on was a bit of hipster irony to some extent, but we soon dropped the pretense when we noticed how much we were legitimately enjoying this music. There was real innovation going on here and it turned out Genesis was right about there being a kinship in Denny's approach to arrangements with that being pursued by the modern experimental musicians. You could definitely hear the attention to detail in the creation of "ambiance" between the two. Using odd vocal effects was just an early precursor to some of the more extreme sounds eventually used to create atmosphere in the contemporary arena.

This music remained something of a cult among the underground for several years until RE/Search publications started putting out their Incredibly Strange Music volumes in the early 1990s. The two books in this series became touchstones as they ventured into the record collections of the artists who were influenced by music on the fringes. The books were directly inspired by the alternative music underground's obsession with the strange. The dissemination of this information then kicked off a massive revival of retro music throughout the remainder of the decade. By the mid 1990s, there were special club nights and nightclubs entirely dedicated to the old "swing" music or exotica or space-age pop. People were dressing up in retro clothes and record companies were reissuing everything they could dig up from their vaults on CD, usually wonderfully remastered from the original tapes.

While the mainstream has moved on from its nostalgia fads of that decade, enough of a support base has remained that we continue to have access to this music in the modern forms of streaming media and digital distribution. The music has returned to its cult status, somewhat, but at least it still survives in our modern media landscape for new generations to discover its charms.