Les Baxter Tribute.

Here's my collected information, shares and snippets on the father of exotica Les Baxter.

Facts about Les Baxter:

• He wrote the "Whistle" theme from the TV show Lassie.

• In the 1960s, he formed the Balladeers, a besuited and conservative folk group that at one time featured a young David Crosby.

• In his 1996 appreciation for Wired magazine, writer David Toop remembered Baxter thus: "Baxter offered package tours in sound, selling tickets to sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll around some taboo emotions before lunch, view a pagan ceremony, go wild in the sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home hi-fi comforts in the white suburbs."

• Les Baxter has a motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6314 Hollywood Blvd.

• Baxter did not restrict his activities to recording. As he once told Soundtrack! magazine, "I never turn anything down".

• Abandoning a concert career as a pianist, he turned to popular music as a singer. At the age of 23 he joined Mel Tormé's Mel-Tones, singing on Artie Shaw records such as "What Is This Thing Called Love?".

STOP PRESS:

Jungle Jazz and Teen Drums added in sidebar thanks to Distant Earth blog.

New link to Festival of the Gnomes. I'd never even heard of this before I did the album list and now I've found it!

Voices in Rythym now posted thanks to Kelly's Lounge Sounds.

Links now re-organised slightly. Soundtracks and Compilations now have their own section. On that basis the Capitol and Reprise sections are now complete.