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.

Hot Rhythm

Cal Tjader Mambo Quintet – Ritmo Caliente!
Fantasy Records, 3-216, 1957, San Francisco

The 1950s was the decade in which the 10" 78 rpm records were gradually replaced with the 12" 33 rpm ones. And cheesecake erotica covers appeared as soon as the LPs came along apparently to increase sale numbers. It probably worked too but I wouldn't know to what extend. I do know for a fact that there are record collectors out there that buy every depiction of nudity on a sleeve they can get their hands on. I'm not one of them but a cute nude picture doesn't deter my selections either. The naked women on the sleeves in the 50s and 60s were somewhat obscured as full nudity was taboo still. Three major categories can be distinguished: multiple exposures as on the Cal Tjader above, body paint (as on a famous Paul Mauriat cover), and slide projections. Next week's post will have an example of slide projections on women's bodies on an Alan Lorber jazz album. The Ritmo Caliente! vinyl is colored bright red and that's the last thing I'll mention about the appearance of the LP. 

The 1950s was also the decade that jazz music started to look at music from outside the US borders. The first focus was Cuba. Cuban jazz orchestras had already captured an audience in the big cities of the US before Dizzy Gillespie collaborated with Cuban musicians to make the first crossover Latin jazz recordings. It became a craze in the 1950s. Cal Tjader was one of the most important jazz musicians that hired Cuban musicians to play in his bands and his Mambo Quintet of the mid/late 50s is considered one of the outstanding Latin jazz combos of all time. Ritmo Caliente! consists of some of the earlier recordings by this band (and by Tjader as a bandleader). The recordings on this record were made in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1954, and a few additional tracks in New York in 1955. The biggest difference between the LA and SF recordings is the addition of a flute in San Francisco. The New York recordings had different personnel. Lamento de Hodi, the track below was recorded in 1955 in New York and features Jerome Richardson on flute, Al McKibbon-bass, Armando Perazas-conga and bongos, Manuel Duran on piano, and the vibraphones of Cal Tjader.