Post #33038 by kahukini on Mon, May 5, 2003 8:41 PM

vic, your [email protected] address bounced, please see this:

hey vic, I saved the text of that ny times obit b/c I knew it would
eventually be unavailable on their site (you have to buy it now to see
it)...

but this is fair use, being an educational tribute, so you can put it on
the site:

New York Times
March 3, 2002

Arthur Lyman, 70, King of the Jungle Vibraphone, Dies

By LAWRENCE DOWNES

rthur Lyman, a Hawaiian vibraphonist who squawked, rattled, thumped, hooted and cawed his way to the top of the world of Polynesian mood music in the 1950's and early 1960's, died on Feb. 24 in Honolulu. He was 70 and had been regularly performing his old hits — including his signature tune, "Yellow Bird" — for tourists in Waikiki until last year.

The cause was throat cancer, his family said.

Back when tiki gods walked the earth, in the golden age of pupu platters, Mr. Lyman was, for a while, king. His musical realm was exotica, a term taken from the title of a 1959 album by Martin Denny, the genre's other giant, in whose combo Mr. Lyman played vibes.

Exotica blended cool jazz with primitive percussion instruments, bird calls and other jungle noises to evoke a steamy tropical mood. Mr. Lyman once told an interviewer that he had hit upon his mixture spontaneously, throwing out a few squawks during a performance of the "Vera Cruz" movie theme. The audience squawked back, and a formula was born. Or maybe not. Many others credit Mr. Denny with inventing exotica, although Mr. Lyman pushed it to its limits, in more than 30 albums and in concerts and club appearances around the world.

A 1962 article in Time magazine captured Mr. Lyman, then 29, at the peak of his fame. "Taboo," his first solo album after splitting with Mr. Denny, had sold nearly two million copies. "A conch shell wailed, the conga drums thump-thumped, the bamboo sticks clattered," the magazine wrote. "The four men on stage were constantly on the move — clacking wooden blocks, scratching a corrugated gourd, flailing away at Chinese gongs, weaving rhythms that were insistent, sinuous and hypnotic. Occasionally, when the spirit moved them, they barked like seals or whooped like cranes."

"The happy audience at Chicago's Edgewater Beach Hotel rattled the rafters whooping back."

Mr. Lyman was born in 1932 and grew up in Honolulu. He said he learned music through a strange form of child abuse: Each day after school, Mr. Lyman recalled, his father would lock him in his room with a toy marimba and some Benny Goodman records and order him to play along for the rest of the day.

He hated it, but eventually mastered every Lionel Hampton solo, and was playing in a jazz club in Honolulu by 14. After joining Mr. Denny's combo, he eventually replaced him as the headliner at the Shell Bar of the Hawaiian Village Hotel. From there, his national recording and touring career took off.

Though exotica's heyday ended quickly, Mr. Lyman kept performing, ending his most recent engagement at the New Otani Kaimana Beach Hotel only when he became too sick to play. He is survived by his wife, JoAnn, of Honolulu; a daughter, Kapiolani, of Sacramento; two sons, Arthur Jr. and Aaron; two sisters, Emily Rabe and Margaret Speegle, both of Alaska; a brother, William; seven grandchildren and six great- grandchildren.

Though Mr. Lyman was Hawaiian, unlike most of the musicians who fed the Polynesian craze, there was nothing particularly authentic about his music. The only tropical islands remotely resembling the ones his songs recall are Bali Hai and Gilligan's, and "Yellow Bird," which reached No. 4 on the pop charts in 1961, is a Haitian folk melody.