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Those who think exotica records are just tiki silliness and kitsch should definitely give Les Baxter’s Tamboo a serious listen. Despite the cheezy and ignorantly semi-racist cover art work, there is some serious music going on here. Baxter was an extremely prolific composer and record producer who worked in the fields of easy listening and soundtracks, as well as different varieties of what has come to be called ‘exotica’. Over the years, as the exotica style became a gimmick, Les let his artistry slip, but this is one of Baxter’s early exotica attempts and on this one he is earnest and sincere about mixing different musical genres into a fascinating new style of his own.
The whole idea of melding musical styles to create a sort of fantasy world of sound begins with Les Baxter. Before there was Sun Ra, King Crimson, Herbie’s Sextet, Brian Eno or Bill Laswell there was Les Baxter mixing Afro-Cuban rhythms, Debussy’s orchestrations and modern studio trickery to create musical lands that didn’t really exist. Sun Ra himself stated his admiration for Baxter, an admiration I had always assumed after hearing Sun Ra’s very exotica flavored ‘Angels and Demons at Play’ LP.
Saying that there is something other-worldly or futuristic about this music may seem cliché since it is obvious that is what Baxter is going for, but when those wordless vocals quietly cascade over a syncopated Afro-Latin groove accompanied by first dew in the morning twinkly Debussy type orchestrations, you know you have arrived somewhere very different then the places you have known before, a place that is very moving and beautiful too.