My dad was an early exponent of "high-fidelity" and jumped on the stereo bandwagon early, 1957 I believe. Accordingly his collection included several high fidelity and stereo demonstration discs, and I grew up with the sounds of marimbas, glockenspiels and boo-bams (forever warping my nascent tastes). I became a collector of Arthur Lyman LPs, whose music not only fulfilled the "stereo demonstration" niche but I thought was pretty artistically progressive too.
About 1999 for Christmas I put together a CD-R for my sister called "This Is The Soundtrack To Your Life" which included a bunch of the stuff my dad played, stuff that was hits before the Beatles: Herb Albert, Percy Faith, Henry Mancini, Horst Jankowski, Paul Mauriat, Arthur Lyman, Bill Purcell, etc. Surprisingly (perhaps) some of these old tunes were remarkably-well recorded and still function today as stereo demonstration music.
Then last year I remembered another record in my dad's collection (long since lost to Goodwill) called "Mallet Magic" (1957) by a xylophonist named Harry Breuer. It turned out to be available on iTunes, along with a sequel "Mallet Mischief" from the following year. It's corny (xylophone, organ, guitar and percussion) but brings back fond memories. That second LP was featured on the cover of the "Incredibly Strange Music" book, if you've heard of that.
To continue the story, over Thanksgiving when my sister was staying with me she asked if I had any good marimba music. Both of us have been looking for good jazz marimba for decades (there's not much out there). I did some more searching while she was here, and ran across an album called "Potent Percussion" by Don Catelli & the All Stars which turned out to be typical 1961 easy-listening. This reminded me of a series of albums released by former big band leader Enoch Light in the '57-'61 timeframe to capitalize on the hi-fi fad entitled "Provocative Percussion" (Vol.s 1-3) and "Persuasive Percussion" (Vol.s 1-3). I could not stomach the music contained therein though -- REALLY Lawrence Welkian -- so ended up not downloading any. I did find an Enoch Light album called "Tabu" (1957) however where he jumped on the Arthur Lyman faux-Polynesian fad and created Hawaiian music with exaggerated stereo effects and lots of colorful percussion. He even covers some of the same songs as Catelli... so that now fills out my Catelli CD-R.
I feel so old listening to easy-listening music. Jesus, where are my teeth???
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