999,901: Martin Denny — Hava Nagila / Scimitar

Lots of fleeting musical trends emerged and vanished in the years after World War II—pretty much all of the trends not called Rock N' Roll, actually—but Martin Denny's exotica was probably the only one based on a kitschy restaurant fad. An amalgam of largely latin instruments, latin rhythms, latin chord progressions and ersatz animal noises (mostly bird calls shouted in turns by members of the combo), exotica's intention was to evoke, uh, the lands of the South Pacific—sort of "Bali Ha'i" as a genre.

Oh, there was the occasional foray into "Asian" territory as well, usually employing the kinds of "Chinese" melodies you can plink out using just the black keys of a piano, but exotica was mainly a phenomenon of tiki culture, that Jonny Quest-ian take on any place that might recently have hosted a death march and was located safely on the other side of a vast ocean. All you really needed was a bunch of Caucasians clad in what you might now call Yacht Rock gear, the suggestion of a non-white nation more than 1,000 miles from North America, and a minor key, and you had the makings of a pretty decent exotica song.

Denny's fake world music was certainly real enough for his fans, the denizens of sunken suburban living rooms in new developments throughout the US, who might well have been sipping home-made mai tais while spinning a side or two of exotica and eyeing the scantily-clad, vaguely Asian or Polynesian lass splayed across the album cover. It didn't matter if it was all make-believe, since if you were resigned to life in suburbia you might as well fantasize about places that technically didn't exist.

And as long as you're mixing together cultures willy-nilly, why not go completely for broke? Why not take your sluggish congas, your grooved cylinders, your wordless female vibratos, your cascading piano lines—all the usual trappings of your grass-skirted, faux island music—and apply them to a Jewish folk song that was written to celebrate the Balfour declaration? And since nobody loves the Balfour Declaration like the Arab people, how about you tack on something vaguely Arabian sounding? After all, Arabs and Jews go together as well as the music of Arabs, Jews, the Chinese, Fijians and Cubans does.

Hava Nagila / Scimitar - Marti...