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."
- 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?".
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.
RSS Feed (xml)