Search - The Sonny Lester Orchestra :: Exotica

It's awful! It's wonderful!

Mark Schildberg | Houston, TX USA | 04/27/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is truly music born in another place and time. To describe itself as "sensuous" is to use some definition of the word that I'm not aware of. When I played this disc for a friend, he collapsed on the floor laughing, saying it was the least-sensuous music he had ever heard. And yet, it is all expertly played and arranged, trying to evoke images of Arabia or other non-Western locales. It is very much the cocktail-lounge brand of music that was so popular in the Fifties and Sixties. The sexual revolution made this sort of thing obsolete, and now it's a quaint reminder of what society used to think risque. But try not to giggle at an instrumentation of xylophone, Hammond organ and trombones."