Yma Sumac Exotica Vocalist

Yma Sumac: Exotica World Music Vocalist The next Musician Snapshots book in the 'Music You Should Hear Series' is a profile of singer Yma Sumac. With a four-octave range, Peruvian vocalist Yma (pronounced EE-ma) Sumac shocked and captivated 1950s America and became a household name around the world. Her first few albums included loose interpretations of South American melodies with Afro-Cuban rhythms and Western-style instrumentation, making her albums avant garde yet accessible, and cementing her status as the queen of the new musical genre of “exotica.” Not only did her extremely wide octave range make audiences stop in their tracks (for reference, most people have a singing range of around 2-3 octaves), but her fearless vocal experimentation was a stark contrast to the sweet crooners like Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby who were the top sellers in 1950, the year her first album was released. She was soon featured on Broadway, cast in movies alongside stars such as Charlton Heston, and performing sold-out shows from Las Vegas to New York.

Half the range of the piano keyboard! At last a serious critical examination of the utterly unique vocalist celebrated for her "four-octave voice," Yma Sumac! A confounding, sometimes heartbreaking, mixture of absurd show-biz hype, stunning virtuosity, and sometimes ravishing artistry, Yma Sumac was a firmly established recording artist of the folk music of her native Peru when she came to America to be "discovered." And discovered she was-by the publicity department of Capitol Records and the "Exotica" pop music maestro Les Baxter. From there her story becomes ever more tangled and weird-and deeply interesting. Yma herself is an amazingly contradictory mix. Nicholas Limansky (a formally trained professional singer) is able to demonstrate that she was startlingly sophisticated technically even though almost entirely self-taught. What is perhaps even more astonishing than the celebrated 4-octave range of her voice-and its effortless clarity and sweetness-was the nearly incredible longevity-fully 4 decades!-of her ability to command it. With the enthusiastic collaboration of her quixotic, charming, slightly rascally husband, she went along with the corruption of her artistic identity by the gleefully amoral record-company publicists, creators of her public persona-Inca Princess (sometimes Priestess!)-from a primitive mountain tribe (or, sometimes, descended from a line of kings that was said to go back several hundred years before there were any Incas)! Imperious as any diva with her intimates and musical collaborators, she maintained an unassailable dignity and unaffected graciousness as a performer and in relation to her fans. All documented in this large, lavishly illustrated volume-an extensively researched biography (her birth date established once and for all!), many personal anecdotes of her intimates, technical discussions of her voice and her music, generous excerpts from reviews and priceless examples of publicity material. About the author: Nicholas E. Limansky studied voice at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and has a performance degree from the University of West Virginia. He has sung with The Bach Aria Group, Musica Sacra, New York Choral Artists (of the New York Philharmonic), and the Opera Orchestra of New York. He reviews new vocal releases of historical singers for Opera News, The Record Collector, Classical Singer and Opera Quarterly. His vocal specialty is the acuto-sfogato (extended-vocal-range) soprano. His work on Yma Sumac has covered nearly three decades.

Yma Sumac: Exotica World Music Vocalist -- The next Musician Snapshots book in the 'Music You Should Hear Series' is a profile of singer Yma Sumac. With a four-octave range, Peruvian vocalist Yma (pronounced EE-ma) Sumac shocked and captivated 1950s America and became a household name around the world. Her first few albums included loose interpretations of South American melodies with Afro-Cuban rhythms and Western-style instrumentation, making her albums avant garde yet accessible, and cementing her status as the queen of the new musical genre of "exotica." Not only did her extremely wide octave range make audiences stop in their tracks (for reference, most people have a singing range of around 2-3 octaves), but her fearless vocal experimentation was a stark contrast to the sweet crooners like Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby who were the top sellers in 1950, the year her first album was released. She was soon featured on Broadway, cast in movies alongside stars such as Charlton Heston, and performing sold-out shows from Las Vegas to New York.

Tiki torches, cocktails, la dolce vita, and the music that popularized them—Mondo Exotica offers a behind-the-scenes look at the sounds and obsessions of the Space Age and Cold War period as well as the renewed interest in them evident in contemporary music and design. The music journalist and radio host Francesco Adinolfi provides extraordinary detail about artists, songs, albums, and soundtracks, while also presenting an incisive analysis of the ethnic and cultural stereotypes embodied in exotica and related genres. In this encyclopedic account of films, books, TV programs, mixed drinks, and above all music, he balances a respect for exotica’s artistic innovations with a critical assessment of what its popularity says about postwar society in the United States and Europe, and what its revival implies today. Adinolfi interviewed a number of exotica greats, and Mondo Exotica incorporates material from his interviews with Martin Denny, Esquivel, the Italian film composers Piero Piccioni and Piero Umiliani, and others. It begins with an extended look at the postwar popularity of exotica in the United States. Adinolfi describes how American bachelors and suburbanites embraced the Polynesian god Tiki as a symbol of escape and sexual liberation; how Les Baxter’s album Ritual of the Savage (1951) ushered in the exotica music craze; and how Martin Denny’s Exotica built on that craze, hitting number one in 1957. Adinolfi chronicles the popularity of performers from Yma Sumac, “the Peruvian Nightingale,” to Esquivel, who was described by Variety as “the Mexican Duke Ellington,” to the chanteuses Eartha Kitt, Julie London, and Ann-Margret. He explores exotica’s many sub-genres, including mood music, crime jazz, and spy music. Turning to Italy, he reconstructs the postwar years of la dolce vita, explaining how budget spy films, spaghetti westerns, soft-core porn movies, and other genres demonstrated an attraction to the foreign. Mondo Exotica includes a discography of albums, compilations, and remixes.

The next title in the “Music You Should Hear Series” is a profile of drone/ambient musician William Basinski. His work as a musician, composer, remixer, and producer is a marriage of opposites: classical/populist; ephemeral/timeless; Eastern/Western (both in terms of the United States, and the wider world); inspired/crafted, ambient/overwhelming. Basinski's music - largely focused on aged recordings made with archaic technology - is an extended meditation on longing and decay, bursting forth into an infinite state of eternal grace.

The fascinating story behind California’s mid-twentieth century obsession with all things Polynesian and Hawaiian. After World War II, suburbs proliferated around California cities as returning soldiers traded in their uniforms for business suits. After-hours leisure activities took on an island-themed sensuality that bloomed from a new fascination with Polynesia and Hawaii. Movies and television shows filmed in Malibu and Burbank urged viewers to escape everyday life with the likes of Elvis, Gidget, and Hawaiian Eye. Restaurants like Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s sprang up to answer the demand for wild cocktails and even wilder décor. A strange hodgepodge of idols, lush greenery and colorful drinks, Tiki beckoned men and women to lose themselves in exotic music and surf tunes. Take a trip back in time to the scene of Polynesian pop and three decades of palm trees, Mai Tais, and torches with this informal guide to the rise, fall, and resurgence of Tiki culture.

In Are We Not New Wave? Theo Cateforis provides the first musical and cultural history of the new wave movement, charting its rise out of mid-1970s punk to its ubiquitous early 1980s MTV presence and downfall in the mid-1980s. The book also explores the meanings behind the music's distinctive traits-its characteristic whiteness and nervousness; its playful irony, electronic melodies, and crossover experimentations. Cateforis traces new wave's modern sensibilities back to the space-age consumer culture of the late 1950s/early 1960s. Theo Cateforis is Assistant Professor of Music History and Culture in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University.

Martin and Rebecca Cate, founders and owners of Smuggler’s Cove (the most acclaimed tiki bar of the modern era) take you on a colorful journey into the lore and legend of tiki: its birth as an escapist fantasy for Depression-era Americans; how exotic cocktails were invented, stolen, and re-invented; Hollywood starlets and scandals; and tiki’s modern-day revival, in this James Beard Award-winning cocktail book. Featuring more than 100 delicious recipes (original and historic), plus a groundbreaking new approach to understanding rum, Smuggler’s Cove is the magnum opus of the contemporary tiki renaissance. Whether you’re looking for a new favorite cocktail, tips on how to trick out your home tiki grotto, help stocking your bar with great rums, or inspiration for your next tiki party, Smuggler’s Cove has everything you need to transform your world into a Polynesian Pop fantasia. Make yourself a Mai Tai, put your favorite exotica record on the hi-fi, and prepare to lose yourself in the fantastical world of tiki, one of the most alluring—and often misunderstood—movements in American cultural history.