Post #689600 by bongofury on Sat, Aug 10, 2013 6:56 AM

Hi, I just ran across your tikicentral post about our Exotics album (okay, I 'd googled my own name just to see what turned up), and was quite surprised to learn that a copy of it was still floating around out there. I 'm the Ray Kaneyama who played vibes on the album. We made it while the four of us were in high school--probably in 1961, I think. We were just four friends who were into the Lyman/Denny sound, and my father (a very serious amateur musician himself) arranged for us to cut the album. I don 't remember very much about it, but I suppose we ordered whatever was the minimum number of albums back then, and most were bought up by our friends and relatives.
Interestingly enough, I actually ended up working with Arthur Lyman himself for a couple of years, but that 's another story. Anyway, I just thought I should let you know a little about the album you bought by accident, even though I 'm somewhat embarrassed by how amateurish I know we sound on it. But what the heck, we were high school kids--what did we know?
--Ray Kaneyama, Honolulu

To answer your questions:

Did your band play many live gigs?

I frankly don't remember a whole lot, but I know that we did do several gigs on our home island (Kauai), some of which probably paid a little bit, others while were free (e.g. for our high school). We also flew over to Honolulu for a couple of gigs, but making money was never a major objective for us.

Did the lp have a cover or did it just come in a plain jacket?

It did have a cover, but just some simple line-drawing type artwork as I recall, no photos or anything.

Do you have any photos of the band?

I probobly have some somewhere, but I wouldn't even know where to begin to look.

Are you still in contact with the other band members?

I see two of them on rare occasions. Our bassist, Jon Ogata, was an engineer at Pearl Harbor for many years, is now retired and living here in Honolulu. Our percussionist, Alan Marugame is working as an architect in Alaska (yes, Alaska). Our pianist, Jeanette Hee, died in a tragic auto accident in the mid-70's, when she would have been around 30 years old, I believe.

We were just on Oahu in October and saw the Waitiki 7 which features the son of former Martin Denny percussionist Augie Colon.

I never actually played with Augie, but we of course ran into each other occasionally. He was quite a guy. His son seems to be quite talented as well.

I would love to hear about your time with Arthur Lyman too.

I was with Arthur (on piano) for about two years during the early '70's, towards the tail end of his group's career. He was through cutting albums at that point, so I never recorded with him. I took over for Clem Low; the other members were Archie Grant on bass (he just died this past year) and Harold Chang on percussion (he's still living, just down the street from me, in fact). We were on the road for pretty much the whole two years, going up and down the west coast (mostly San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle), and also Guam and Japan. It was an interesting time, but living out of a suitcase got old pretty fast (especially since I was fairly newly married).

--Ray Kaneyama