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Tiki Central / Tiki Music / Tiny Bubbles - with a real tiki - on Lawrence Welk

Post #523193 by tiki mick on Sat, Apr 10, 2010 8:05 AM

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TM

[So Lucas, what do you think of this guy?....

(And Lucas knows who it is. For those of you who don't, it's NOT Jesus Christ, Jim Morrison, or Charles Manson.)

eden ahbez is someone that hippies always like to use to show a connection between hippy music like the Grateful Dead, and the exotica/lounge scene. Yet, he is an asbolute anomaly. The one guy back then who adopted a hippy look, yet also had a pseudo exotica album, and wrote "Nature Boy" (which is not an exotica tune, by the way). But, he is hardly a real example of much crossover between two polar opposite genres of music!
The only real crossover between the two worlds occured when bands like Arthur Lyman, Martin Denny, Les Baxter (and also people like Wes Montgomery) started covering 60's pop songs. And I only see two aspects of that: One, it was pandering and an attempt to stay relevant, and two, often times the end result was actually BETTER then the original versions of the songs!(in my opinion).

But of course, this is hardly restricted to exotica and lounge, of course. Earth Wind and Fire did a version of "got to get you into my life" by the Beatles, which in my opinion, blows the original away!

My explanation for all of that is at the heart of something I truly believe: Good musicianship! Let's face it, the people of the exotica, jazz and lounge era were true musicians, with advanced, highly technical training (usually through serious classical music lessons from an early age) So of course, when they cover a song that was originally performed and/or written by untrained, amateur rock musicians, they jazz it up and make it better. The same can be said for most of the funk bands of the 70's. These were in no way amatuer musicians, and when you look at bands like CHIC and others of that genre, you see that most came from the "straight" music world (but also the gospel/church scene)

Of course, I am speaking in generalities, and there are rock musicians with the same amount of training and experience, who chose rock over "straight" music as thier main gig. But those are few and far between. In general, most rock music came from someone's garage, and most exotica/lounge/jazz came from a music conservatory. It's not for nothing that Miles Davis attended Julliard, for example.

[ Edited by: lucas vigor 2010-04-10 08:08 ]