Martin Denny - Details

Biography

In 1956, in the U.S. territory of Hawaii, an entirely new sort of pop culture was getting underway. Martin Denny and his combo were creating an imaginary musical landscape of tropical torpor and bliss - moist and menacing rain forests, vibrantly plumed birds in full flight, fierce mute stone Tiki gods languishing in overgrown vines, sleeping fishing villages on bamboo stilts, glittering coral reefs, volcanoes bursting with molten-orange lava, smiling, obliging brown nymphettes in grass skirts - lotus land - in a word, "Exotica"...

With global reference points from the Afro-percussion of Cuba and Brazil and the jagged flute arpeggios of Peru to minor chord melodies from the Middle East and Hollywood soundtracks, Exotica is in no way indigenously "Hawaiian." As Martin Denny points out, "A lot of the Hawaiian music when I arrived here was played on steel guitar, and I felt that that limited you and put you in sort of a rut. By using vibes, mallet instruments, I was able to come up with different sounds, and it replaced the perennial sound of steel guitar. And then by inserting different rhythms, especially Latin rhythms, you supply the excitement that goes with it... and then, of course, the feeling of the South Pacific, the languor, a relaxed sound."