Exotica

Liberty Records issued Exotica in 1957 (LRP 3034), cut in Hollywood in December 1956. The charts came from the Martin Denny Group’s live set at the Shell Bar in Henry J. Kaiser’s Hawaiian Village in Honolulu: Denny on piano, Arthur Lyman on vibes, John Kramer on bass, and Augie Colón on percussion and bird calls.

The open-air room sat next to a pond. Frogs croaked when the band played and stopped when the music stopped; one night the players answered with bird calls, and a guest asked for “the song with the frogs.” Denny kept the gag, rubbing a grooved stick for the croak on Les Baxter’s “Quiet Village.” The single later reached the Billboard top five; the LP hit No. 1 on the monophonic album chart in 1959 and gave the lounge circuit a name for the sound it was already chasing.

What you hear is small-combo fantasy — piano, vibes, marimba, Latin percussion, and those animal noises — not a field recording of the Pacific. Denny called it a mix of South Pacific and Orient, “what a lot of people imagined the islands to be like.” Sandy Warner’s cover model, later nicknamed the Exotica Girl, became the face of a long Liberty run.