Take one part diverse players with intense focus and killer chops, and one part neglected mid-century multi-ethnic hybrid music with origins on America’s harmonious island paradise. Add a dash of Technicolor tropical dreamscape, a twist of wild birdcalls, and stir soulfully.
WAITIKI 7
serves up this polychrome cocktail, taking a new serious spin on exotica, the musical genre that leaped from Hawai‛i’s fashionable bars and clubs to mainstream living rooms in post-War America. Keeping true to exotica’s deep roots and intense demands on musicians with New Sounds of Exotica
, the group brings heady passion, acoustic musicianship, and a love of old-school mixology to an art form just begging to be revisited and savored.
WAITIKI 7
The luscious mix that is exotica—the blend of tropical soundscapes, Latin percussion, and popular jazz perfected by Martin Denny
, Arthur Lyman
, and their ensembles—has been profoundly misunderstood. Far from the kitsch of its waning days, the best exotica flows from two very positive and progressive places: the multi-cultural openness of Hawai‛i’s music scene in the first half of the 20th century, and the mid-century impulses that fueled a craze for transcontinental travel and curiosity about Asian-Pacific cultures.
“It was a huge thing at that time to fly from the West Coast to Hawai‛i,” explains Randy Wong, the Hawai‛i-born, classically trained founder of WAITIKI 7
. “It became the stepping stone to the East. People became genuinely fascinated by these cultures. The war was over, and there was a spirit of real optimism and excitement.”
“It was a huge thing at that time to fly from the West Coast to Hawai‛i,” explains Randy Wong, the Hawai‛i-born, classically trained founder of WAITIKI 7
These new travelers came to Hawai‛i and discovered what had been brewing in the relatively open climate of cross-cultural exploration for several decades: a vibrant music scene with everything from mixed Hawaiian and English folk ballads, to second-generation Japanese club bands made of traditional Asian instruments, to Puerto Rican percussionists who had recently come to work in the sugar industry. “The musicians who played exotica came from this scene,” Wong notes. “It was really one of the first popular world-music hybrids in America.”
Enterprising bandleaders brought all these sounds together, creating groups that Wong describes as “one huge rhythm section,” so huge that Martin Denny
Exotica musicians were highly skilled, fastidious arrangers, often drawing on Hollywood experience to craft the perfectly evocative sound of the fantastic tropics. Wong, who has had a chance to study Denny’s scores, was blown away by the level of detail. These were serious musicians “with serious chops,” Wong smiles, and a serious approach to even the campiest moments in the music.
WAITIKI 7
Adding a new dimension to the rhythm sections of the past, lush melodies come to the fore on WAITIKI 7’s
“The song does things with Latin rhythms and percussion that never happen. The güiro (notched gourd), for instance, is played backwards, something you just don’t do,” explains Wong. “But it works and makes for one mean song.”
The group comes by its love of exotica honestly. WAITIKI 7
“It’s exciting, and you can’t help but get into it. When Lopaka whoops and howls, he sounds like some marvelous bird, and he’s playing intense percussion parts at the same time,” Wong enthuses. “The birdcalls are a virtuosic element, and they require an acoustic approach to work well. Samples or keyboards can sound so canned. And it really gives the original exotica musicians like Augie their due.”
Wong himself was exposed to the magic of these calls as a child. He grew up tagging along with his grandfather to hear Arthur Lyman
WAITIKI 7’s
Tiki culture and its exotica soundtrack have another serious side: the heady cocktails once served alongside the music’s sonic dreamscapes. And just like real exotica demands virtuosic musicianship, real tiki cocktails require premium ingredients artfully balanced: freshly creamed coconuts, just squeezed juices, homemade allspice liqueurs, the clove-lime-almond notes of falernum syrup.
“We’re taking this wholly authentic approach to the music,” Wong explains. “To stay in line with that, we take our cocktails very seriously, in the same vein as us performing acoustically.” Wong and WAITIKI 7
Serious tiki fans, as WAITIKI 7
And last but not least, “We of course do tiki festivals,” Wong chuckles. “Nothing like a field full of New Englanders wearing fezzes and sipping rum barrels to get in the mood. It doesn’t get much better than that.”