The Lotus Palace

The Alan Lorber Orchestra – The Lotus Parade
Verve Records, MGM, V6-8711, 1967
Made in the USA, Alan Lorber Productions, Inc.

This week's tune is by The Alan Lorber Orchestra. I had announced its coming last week by virtue of the nudity on the cover. In Wikipedia I read (I had never heard of Alan Lorber or that record) that Lorber was a leading arranger of pop music in the 1960s and that he created the so called "Bosstown Sound" (or "Boston Sound"), he had recorded over 2,000 records that earned well over $60 million. The Lotus Palace is one of the few records under Lorber's own name and his best known. The music on the record are played with electronic pop, and classical Indian musical instruments. The intention was to make a hybrid of pop, jazz, and Indian music, but the results are cheap and cheezy easy listening tunes, mostly soft versions of well known pop standards such as Up, Up and Away, and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Still, it's all well done—and for the sake of novelty—it resides in my collection's A-list. The pick of the litter is the tune Roopaka Dha Teri Dhin Dhin, the only song on the LP that is not a cover version but written for the occasion. The author is Collin Walcott, who plays the sitar on the record.