Album Notes

"If there's room for a postmillennial exotica revival, this is the band to beat."—Nate Chinen

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.

The WAITIKI 7 serves up this polychrome cocktail, taking a new serious spin on exotica, the musical genre that leaped from Hawaii’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 (Pass Out; June 7, 2010), 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.

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.