Album Notes

(Commemorates the 50th Anniversary of Hawai‘i's Statehood)

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, to be released August 18th on Pass Out Records, is a contemporary reimagining of the classic exotica sound introduced on the islands exactly 50 years ago—the year of Hawaii's statehood—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 (themselves already set to jazz harmonies, and
incorporating folk songs from the Far East) 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 bow at the altar of Martin Denny and other exotica pioneers such as Les Baxter and Juan Garcia Esquivel, The WAITIKI 7—whose name cleverly fuses that of the famous Honolulu beach with the faux-Polynesian gods ubiquitous in island culture—is a band for today. The WAITIKI 7 retains the essence of Denny-era exotica and reconstitutes it for contemporary audiences raised on a multitude of clashing musical genres and pop culture images.