News & Updates — exotica

Kofi Ghanaba, aka Guy Warren, was the first musician from the African continent to become known with a career and recordings in the USA, fusing American jazz with African folk forms. He was also a teacher, writer, historian and pan-Africanist of renown. A Ghanaian by birth, during WW2 he worked for the US as a spy, after which he became a journalist and a jazz musician. In 1947 he was a founding member of the great African-jazz band The Tempos with ET Mensah. In '51 he became the first African to become a BBC radio producer and also did radio...

Maya Deren was the mother of American avant-garde cinema. Her films were surreal and intense, full of symbolism and incredibly strange ideas. Check out The Very Eye of Night, Meshes of the Afternoon and At Land. She was a Ukrainian Jew who fled to the US with her family to escape the ethnic-cleansing pogrom. Her first husband was a socialist activist who she married at 18. Her second husband, famous European photographer Alexander Hammid, was co-collaborator on Meshes and her third husband, Japanese-American composer Teiji Ito, made some amazing soundtracks to these films. John Cage and Marcel Duchamp were involved...

The Muslim-American multi-instrumentalist and folklorist Chief Bey contributed some heavy percussion to the ethno-jazz scene from the '50s until just weeks before his death in 2004. He was born James Hawthorne Bey in the area of Beaufort SC and grew up in Brooklyn & Harlem. In the '50s he toured internationally in a production of Porgy & Bess (with Cab Calloway and Leontyne Price. Around 1951 he cut his first session as a bandleader, although it was credited to "Cawanda's group" (the exotica cash-in LP Taboo). In '59 he appeared on Olatunji's Afro smash-hit record Drums of Passion and went...

When I was a teenager I was into all this crazy free jazz stuff (which I am still REALLY into, FYI) and someone like Herbie Mann seemed like a joke to me. His awful hairy-chested nudie album cover on Push Push was disgusting to me and when a girl I knew (who was into the Grateful Dead...another band I hated in those years) expressed her fondness for both Herbie's "physique" and his music I gave her the album to take it off my hands. (I had bought it in a collection of jazz & blues albums). But the problem with...

The Italian-American composer Henry Mancini has made an impression on my musical sensibilities in my early-eared days.  Ever since I was a little kid one of my favorite tunes was the groovy Pink Panther theme, with that silky sax by Plas Johnson. It was also hard to resist the theme to Peter Gunn (again, sax by Johnson). The soundtrack to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil is another good one, as well as Mancini's great tune "Baby Elephant Walk". Personally, I can do without Moon River and Days of Wine & Roses but you got to hand it to the man...