Time/Life's "Instrumental Favorites" CD
RLott
This is old news, but Time/Life has a 21-CD set of (mostly) lounge and exotica
music, available for order from their website (www.timelife.com).
Taken directly from that site, here are the descriptions of each disc.
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Instrumental Favorites
Vol. 1
Henry Mancini
Henry Mancini's rise as both a movie composer and easy-listening stylist
started when he was a boy at the movies, watching Cecil DeMille's epic The
Crusades. Armored knights and robed infidels clashed as Rudolph Kopp's
breathtaking orchestra prodded the action. Only when the show ended did
young Henry learn that the music did not come from a maestro behind the
curtain, but from an invisible code embedded in the celluloid. From that
moment on, Mancini was determined to break that codeby creating sounds that
tug at the heart strings and the purse strings of the masses.
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Vol. 2
Percy Faith
If sound has color and shape, the music of Percy Faith offers a CinemaScope
extravaganza of gorgeous summer places set against yellow sunsets and blue
moons. Faith's rich tapestries of piano, woodwinds, horns and, of course,
strings evoke a sensorium of soft lights and sweet music from the
Technicolor melodramas of the '50s and early '60s that have left lasting
impressions.
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Vol. 3
Ray Conniff
Ray Conniff's contribution to American popular music can be likened to a
beautiful duet between music and marketing. Combining reverberating horns,
skip-happy beats, and heavenly singers, Conniff amassed a fortune making
music that is suitable for dancing, singing along, or merely permeating the
atmosphere as an unobtrusive mood elevator.
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Vol. 4
Arthur Fiedler
Imagine a New England park against a summer sunset. The aroma of beer and
pretzels wafts through the air. People are relaxed and congenial along the
Esplanade as sailboats graze the river. It's a luscious slice of Americana
that becomes picture perfect when the "light music" of Arthur Fiedler and
his legendary Boston Pops Orchestra begins.
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Vol. 5
Mantovani
Close to half a century ago, when Mantovani emerged with his cascadig
violins, the music world experienced a quiet revolution. That plucked,
layered and lush string sound that seduced listeners in the postwar era may
be taken for granted today, but it was considered novel to hi-fi enthusiasts
and downright heretical to classical traditionalists. Many mood maestros had
used the technique, but Mantovani turned it into a cult, building "a
million-dollar musical empire" by playing what some provincial listeners
might try to dismiss as "dentist's office music."
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Vol. 6
Roger Williams
Roger Williams represents the best of that precious modern icon, the
cocktail pianist. Though he seldom performs in nightclubs, hotel lounges or
saloons these days, his relaxing and romantic mixtures of varying parts
classical, jazz, country, and pop have accopmanied many cocktail hours and
candlelit evenings.
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Vol. 7
Movie Magic
Movie and magic are synonymous. From the time its flickering images first
mesmerized viewers, the cinema appeared as a "magic lantern," a spectacle of
lights, shadows and ghostly effects that challenged expectations and
perceptions. Music has always been amoung the most effective arsenals in
film production. A sound track or theme song may alter a story's moodand
character, turning awkward silences into pregnant pauses. But movie music's
most fascinating impact is on the viewers for whom it establishes lasting
associations and sentiments.
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Vol. 8
Ferrante & Teicher
Apart from both being child prodigies, pianists Ferrante and Teicher were
swept by circumstances and coincidences that forged a supernatural bond.
Arthur Ferrante, born on September 7, 1921, in New York City, and Louis
Teicher, born August 24, 1924, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, had parents
who encouraged their musical abilities practically from the time they were
weaned. Though three years apart, the two developed more as fraternal twins,
with a mutual predilection for piano that channeled them into the Juilliard
School of Music's Prep Center together. The nurturing atmosphere for budding
composers exposed them to the arts of composition and technique from shared
teachers. Their classroom recitals became collaborative efforts as they
performed side by side at the same piano. More than a partnership, they were
a symbiosis that Teicher would later describe as the work of "four hands."
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Vol. 9
Pop Pleasures
In the world of popular music, the '60s may be remembered less for the
generation gap and more for an unprecedented cross-pollination of
generational tastes. It was one in which styles as divergent as rock and
light-classical could mergeinto that most marvelous of music categories:
easy listening.
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Vol. 10
Nelson Riddle
Nelson Riddle is the perfect modern musician, a composer, conductor and
arranger who excelled in every 20th-century medium from radio to television.
His skill at mixing big band, playful pop, movie themes and lushly
orchestrated mood albums makes him difficult to pigeonhole into a single
category. Still, he is best remembered as an easy-listening instrumental
stylist.
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Vol. 11
Jackie Gleason
Before he played Ralph Kramden on the TV series The Honeymooners, Jackie
Gleason was a conductor of mood music. The rotund comedian, usually
associated with happy-go-lucky tunes that accompanied his slapstick skits,
helped to mastermind a series of albums consisting of slow, sensuous and
often sad melodies played at a deliberate pace to encourage contemplation,
romance, and dreaming.
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Vol. 12
Latin Rhythms
Latin: Is it just an ethnic identity or a state of mind? Despite vast
geographic differences, people the world over can make some kind of Latin
claim to their identity. The most lasting element of this part-historical,
part-fictional Latin attitude is the music. More than any other ethnic
music, the Latin sound offers an intoxicating spell to audiences looking for
a few moments of passionate mystery to spice up their daily routines.
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Vol. 13
Broadway Melodies
Tradition dictates that if a stage production has a successful run in New
Haven, it will be a hit on Broadway. Likewise, once a song appears in a
Broadway musical, chances are it will become a popular standard, heard and
loved on both sides of the footlights, in many styles and languages.
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Vol. 14
Lawrence Welk
Champagne offers a multitude of sensory pleasures: the pop of the cork, the
froth cascading into the cocktail glass, the tickling of the tastebuds and
the brain. Lawrence Welk put these sensations into a song, creating
"champagne music," his bouncy, unique style, which has energized ball room
dancers, entertained televison viewers and graced home stereos for decades.
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Vol. 15
Billy Vaughn
Orchestrator, musical director, arranger, composer, lyricist and occasional
cartoonist -- Billy Vaughn championed popular music from all perspectives.
His impressive body of work features breezy beats, spirited harmonies and
mobile melodies that can take listeners into moods alternating between
kinetic and calm.
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Vol. 16
Romantic Moments
Romantic moments are intervals when time stands still, space becomes
infinite and heart overwhelms head. Music for romance can be wispy or
hypnotic, cool or sultry, resulting in tunes that range from the unabashed
gush of Erroll Garner's Misty to the savvy cynicism of Cole Porter's What is
this thing called Love?
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Vol. 17
Around the World
Phileas Fogg, the protagonist in Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty
Days, set out to travel the world in a specified number of days, hours, and
minutes. Like the stops on Phileas Fogg's itinerary, the international
horizons presented in this collection have track times that span only four
minutes or less -- yet these brief glimpses offer unlimited opportunity to
the listener's imaginative wanderlust!
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Vol. 18
Bert Kaempfert
Mix the otherwise warring styles of fox-trot and big band, and you have an
innovation that is uniquely Bert Kaempfert. Kaempfert's interweaving of
tight rhythms and playful melodies reflects his instinct for the swing music
popular in his youth and the strict-temp traditions of his German roots.
Born in Hamburg on October 16, 1923, Kaempfert was an only child who
discovered his muse through a reversal of fortune. When we was six, his
parents survived an automobile accident; they used the compensation money
they were given to provide him piano lessons until he was 14. That training
gave him enough experience to become a medel student at the Hambutg
Conservatory of Music, but his career soon got bound up with the tumult of
growing up in Germany during the 1930s.
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Vol. 19
Exotic Moods
Before "virtual reality" there was exotica music. It offered melodic and
rhythmic simulations of such far-off places as the Congo, the Caribbean, the
South Pacific and various other colorful regions of the globe-all from the
comfort of home via the living room hi-fi.
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Vol. 20
Whimsical Interludes
Civilization, bound by etiquette and at least a semblance of order, grants
special moments when even the most mild mannered citizens can get silly.
Immaculate housewives have been known to break dishes to let off steam,
while some grown men currently take vacation from their corporate selves to
sit around campfires, pound on drums and wail in primal fraternity. But the
best scream-and-snicker therapy comes from music. Just as tensed-up
teenagers resort to frenetic dancing to vent their hormonal aggressions,
those less inclined to rock and roll often find release in a category of
popular instrumental sometimes referred to as "whimsy."
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Vol. 21
101 Strings
For decades, the 101 Strings have been known for pop instrumental records
played by anonymous orchestras and sold at budget prices. That definition
may be technically true, but the Strings deserve credit for much more. Their
relatively inexpensive album packages contain works that are lushly arranged
and performed by skilled musicians. These recordings, which have sold by the
millions, offered every musical venue from the sounds of foreign lands to
interpretations of America's most popular songs.
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Rod Lott
HITCH: The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity
www.ionet.net/~twilken/HITCH
CARS YES
"Exotic Moods" in excellent. Very soft and soothing. I love the Ultra-Lounge
"Mondo Exotica" just as well, but in a different way. It's more up beat, and
that's supurb as well. "Exotic Moods" has nice liner notes and some color
reproductions of the original albums featured in the CD. Joseph Lanza put in
togather. Highly recommended.
Steve-O