The Waitiki 7
Pass Out records
Web: http://waitiki7.com
If,
while listening to The Waitiki 7’s debut album Adventures in Paradise, you find
yourself daydreaming of sipping a cocktail from a tiki mug while lolling about
idyllically on a Hawaiian beach as birds sing merrily in the trees not too far
away, then you get it. Adventures in Paradise is a contemporary reimagining of
the classic exotica sound introduced some 50 years ago by Martin Denny, a
transplanted mainland pianist who tapped into the tropical zeitgeist, stirred
together several disparate elements, and created a whole new sound in the
process.
“Exotica,”
explains Randy Wong, the 28-year-old bassist, music director and co-founder of The
Waitiki 7, “floats in the zone between soundscapes and an early world music
hybrid. Denny took popular WWII-era Hawaiian Island songs and a Latin feel and
then added birdcalls. He took large orchestrations intended for full symphonic
orchestra and pared them down to make them feasible in the combo context. But
exotica just sort of stopped developing in the ’60s.”
Which
is where The Waitiki 7 comes in. Although they take inspiration from Martin
Denny and other exotica pioneers such as Les Baxter and Juan Garcia Esquivel,
The WAITIKI 7 is a band for today, adding various musical genres and pop
culture images.
Adventures
in Paradise was recorded in a whirlwind two-day session at Q-Division Studios in
Somerville, Mass., with Wong and Mayer serving as executive producers and
Brother Cleve, a former member of the ’90s neo-lounge music group Combustible
Edison, serving as production consultant and helping out with the mixing and
mastering. Both original compositions and classic exotica were given The
Waitiki 7 treatment. “Everything is through-composed,” says Wong. “Then of
course the solos are all improvised.”
Any
preconceived notions that exotica might encompass a narrow range of musical
ideas are quickly dispelled upon the first listen to Adventures in Paradise.
From the opening track, a cover of Les Baxter’s “Coronation,” to the closing
title track, the theme from a TV program that ran in the late ’50s and early
’60s, the diversity and virtuosity of The Waitiki 7 are constantly on display.
Highlights include “L’ours Chinois,” a stunning violin concerto composed by
Wong and featuring Liu; a cover of Denny’s “Manila” using such exotic
percussion instruments as the güiro (a gourd played with an egg whisk scraper)
and the quijada (literally the jaw of a donkey); and “Octopus Menagerie,” which
Wong calls “the weirdest tune on the album, with spoken word and avant-garde
trombone.”
Other
tracks run the gamut from “Totem Pole,” originally found on jazz trumpeter Lee
Morgan’s classic album The Sidewinder; to a Zaccai Curtis original called
“Craving”; Denny’s “Left Arm of Buddha,” which Brother Cleve describes as “tiki
noir”; Mayer’s “Ouanalao,” based on the Angolan semba and Caribbean zouk
rhythm; and “Mood Indigo,” the famous Duke Ellington song, arranged for the
band by trombonist Mike Dease. Rounding out the album are the Wong-penned
ballad “Her Majesty’s Pearl,” which he calls “pretty much a dialogue between
piano and vibraphone,” embellished with bird and animal calls, of course;
“Ned’s Redemption,” a short but madcap improvised xylophone rag spotlighting
Benoit; and “Sacha-Cha,” which, as its name implies, is a cha-cha, written by
Wong.
This review will appear in Volume 2 No.4
(2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.
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