 Various Artists In the end, I don't think anyone benefited from the lounge music mania of 1994-95. Longtime exotica fans were continually annoyed at mainstream media focussing on the 50s "swingin' bachelor" angle; bandwagoneers approached it as a fad and destroyed everyone's enjoyment of it; record companies consistently jumped in with the "too little, too late" approach. It was all a good idea that spun out of control. Now, if the mainstream had embraced "found" music of all stripes (the stuff with no real novelty value, like obscure disco product from '79, or mid-90s album tracks by Chicago®), I'm not sure if the end result would have been better for people like me, or worse. Could I live in a world where Joe and Jane Trendypants threw barbecues and played Meadowlark Lemon albums in the background? Or what if I saw a group of teenagers snidely enjoying Good Twins albums outside White Hen Pantry? Better that the martini music came and went, and I still have the Good Twins. I think I was trying to review this volume of Capitol's Ultra-Lounge series. As a series devoted to documenting 50s cocktail music, Ultra-Lounge is unbeatably exhaustive and well-packaged. Bongo Land is one of the better installments in the series, focussing on bongo-driven instrumentals by the usual suspects (Martin Denny, Les Baxter, Dick Hyman) as well as some surprises (The Latin Jazz Sextet featuring Eric Dolphy; Laurindo Almeida). It boils down to fairly good, very listenable, latin jazz and latin jazz-inspired pop. I think the big deflation in the lounge movement centered around the fact that people started to realize that "lounge" as it was being marketed was really just mediocre jazz. Better to just skip the irony and listen to real jazz, right? For anyone that's still interested, the Ultra Lounge series is your best bet for exploring cheesy 50s music. This volume is closer to "real" music than a lot of the volumes, and held out in my collection long after the other volumes I'd bought had been hawked for peep show token money. Perhaps now is the time to get into lounge music … I must admit a perverse affinity to buying hopelessly uncool things at burdensomely hip record stores, just for the awkwardness factor. The best way to get into trends is to dive in a few years after they die, but several years before they come back into vogue. Perhaps I should consider getting into "Profiler" about now.
Review by Habeas R. Corpus |