Hey! What's that sound? Garble in the jungle!?
DESCRIPTION
The Left Arm of Buddha is what you call an "exotic" orchestra. On stage, you can find the spirit of the Tiki culture, burlesque dancing and music inspirated by Rock&Roll, Jazz and Space Age Pop Music born in USA during the 50’s. This is Exotica!
The Left Arm of Buddha propose to take you on a journey through Tropical spots around the world, to popularize the Exotica style which include exotic percussion (marimba, vibraphone, bongos, congas, gongs, drums, ...), a horn section (flute, saxophones, ...) , piano / organ, bass & guitar.
It includes original arrangements of popular songs supposed to represent life scenes in Polynesia, Africa, Asia or in the Amazon according to the compositions. All in a joyful, sensual, dynamic, hypnotic show, to surprise or intrigue a wide audience.
The band is made of eight experienced musicians from the European scene, a sound & video engineer, a light engineer, and several dancing girls. Actually, it’s what we like to call, an exotic review ... an original and rare offer on the worldwide scene!
BIOGRAPHY
In September 2011, they decide to build a “retro-exotico-moderno orchestra” which will include some burselque dances.
For the past 2 years, they have been conceiving the show with the help of their friends: designer, videomaker, stage director. They arranged the orchestration, assembled a band composed with the most serious & qualified persons with who they have had the opportunity to work with in the past ten years.
In February 2012, the musicians began to rehearse. The habit of playing together, their efficient musical level, allowed them to perfect the set in just a few months. They enroll some dancing girls and shape a first draft during a artistical redisence.
First goal!
Attentive at the visual and aesthetical effect, they begin to work on the staging, joined by the excellent Otto Von Chatty, the announcer. Others dancers and a veejay join the crew.
This music might be characterized most easily by what it isn't. It's rarely simple enough in structure and instrumentation to be called rock (and certainly retains enough of a sense of humor to be disqualified as art rock). It's not serious or straightforward enough to be called jazz. It's often too esoteric or extreme to be called pop. It's in some middle ground between all of these, which means it's populated with the outcasts from other well-established genres. As a result, Space Age Pop is full of brilliant, bizarre, and exciting sounds, which are particularly striking to ears accustomed to the stereotypes that populate the more familiar genres.
Among these outcasts, though, there are some common features that a simple categorization can help identify. The following list offers some labels for these categories and matches some names against each. I should state up front, though, that my definition of "Space Age Pop" can be summed up as: all of this and more.
Exotica
The strictest definition limits exotica to the imitations of Polynesian, Afro-Caribbean, and Hawaiian music that were produced by Les Baxter and others from the mid-1950s to the very early 1960s. This music blended the elements of Afro-Cuban rhythms, unusual instrumentations, environmental sounds, and lush romantic themes from Hollywood movies, topped off with evocative titles like "Jaguar God," into a cultural hybrid native to no place outside the San Fernando Valley.
There were two primary strains of this kind of exotica: Jungle and Tiki. Jungle was definitely a Hollywood creation, with its roots in Tarzan movies (and further back, to W.H. Hudson's novel, Green Mansions. Les Baxter was the king of jungle exotica, and spawned a host of imitators while opening the doors for a few more genuine articles such as Chaino, Thurston Knudson, and Guy Warren. Tiki was introduced with Martin Denny's Waikiki nightclub combo cum jungle noises cover of Baxter's "Quiet Village," although Denny's vibe player, Arthur Lyman, soon became the style's most representative artist. Tiki rode a wave of popularity in the late 1950s and early 1960s marked by the entrance of Hawaii as the 50th state in 1959 and the introduction of Tiki hut cocktail bars and restaurants around the continental United States. Tiki exotica is now enjoying a resurgence in popularity, and Tiki mugs and torches that once collected dust in thrift stores are now hot items.
Taken from the excellent site http://spaceagepop.com/