1.  Perez Prado – Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.  I’d been listening to Mr. Bungle’s album California for years before I started trying to track down the music from the 50s and 60s that inspired it.  I wound up tracing a lot of its stylistic hallmarks to a genre called “exotica,” which is more or less the musical equivalent of tiki bars.  But like California, exotica is itself an amalgam of elements from other genres.  When I listened to”Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” just now, another part of the story fell into place.  Perez Prado is the so-called “King of Mambo” — according to Wikipedia, the guy responsible for even the term “mambo.”  The song is, for the most part, boring, obvious and repetitive, except for some kind-of-cool novelty trumpet slides.  But the percussion part behind it, rife with clicks, rolls and taps from an array of mostly wooden instruments, is of a type that’s very familiar to me from both exotica and Mr. Bungle’s avant-garde tribute to it.  It seems that exotica was already around by 1955, even if the name didn’t come around until a couple of years later:  Les Baxter, one of the fathers of the genre, is coming up a little further down in this post.  But since Perez Prado was recording as early as the 1940s (thanks again to Wikipedia), I’m going to assume that this is where that percussion style comes from — if it doesn’t derive from an even earlier form of Cuban music.

2.  Bill Haley and His Comets – Rock Around the Clock.  Ohhh yes.  “Rock Around the Clock” has all the virtues of early rock ‘n’ roll:  clean, clear, direct, with a punchy, percussive sound.  (I have to admit, though, rocking around the clock would be hard if all the songs were this concise.  It’s just two minutes and 11 seconds long, making it the third shortest song we’ve had so far, after “How High the Moon” (2:08) and “Come On-a My House” (2:00))  It’s got two instrumental breaks:  a guitar solo (featuring extensive use of the picked tremolo that would later be associated with surf rock) and a sax + guitar break in which the guitar hits sharp major triads and immediately slides away from them, making the sax sound a bit like a harmonica (traces of rock ‘n’ roll’s blues origins)?  I’m a bit surprised at how nerdy Bill Haley sounds — almost like Reynold of the Cheat Commandos, though that’s an exaggeration.  Had the genre not developed its rebellious image yet, or was this guy really seen as a dangerously libidinous character in 1955?  Or was it only black bands and that gender bender Elvis that made white parents so paranoid?

3. Mitch Miller – Yellow Rose of Texas.  ALARMING.  There’s a seemingly unstoppable military-march beat, and against it a few brass-balled, strong-jawed military men sing about the girl they’re coming back to after the war.  (Yes, “men.” Yes, “girl.”  She’s the “sweetest little rosebud that Texas ever knew”; they sing like their teeth are permanently clenched.)  The chorus is sung in harmony by what sounds like forty people recorded in an empty warehouse.  Periodically the singing is interrupted by a marching-band-style flute duo, and whenever this happens, the key abruptly jumps up a half-step.  “Rio Grande” is pronounced “Rye-O Grand.”  And the narrator’s idea of a nostalgic good time, like things were before the war, is “play[ing] the banjo gaily,” though it’s hard to imagine him doing anything gaily other than maybe saluting a flag.  According to Wikipedia, “yellow” meant “biracial.”  Was the banjo a race-associated instrument?  Was a white man recording a song about a biracial woman in 1955 seen as politically radical (even though he sings it with military clenched teeth, and even though the song goes back at least to the Civil War)?  I don’t know.

4.  Roger Williams – Autumn Leaves.   I guess this is part of the same tradition as Liberace.  Most of the song consists of an orchestra playing a mournful tune while a guitar keeps time (mixed so low that you can really only hear the timbre of the strumming) and Williams plays pseudo-Lisztian virtuoso piano stuff — mostly very fast chromatic scales.  However, there is one wonderful moment when everyone stops and Williams takes over the melody.  Pretty soon the guitar and strings are back, and his playing quickly becomes ornate again, but there’s a little window in the texture where it’s just him, playing three simple chords, and all of a sudden the music sounds like Brahms.  Unrelated weird thing: at one point the tune is identical to a bit of a Communist revolutionary song my mother sang to me when I was a kid, which goes: “So hear the thunder of / The mighty masses / All creeds and colors / Brain and brawn.”  It’s not that unusual a melody, so it could well be a coincidence, but it was still odd to run into it here.

5. Les Baxter and His Orchestra – Unchained Melody.  This is unlike anything I’ve ever heard, including anything else by Les Baxter (and it’s definitely not exotica, either).  I actually had to listen to it twice to figure out what to say about it.  It’s got a bunch of different sections:  slow, poignant late Romantic orchestral bits, groups of singers repeating “unchain me” over and over again, and a melancholy main tune that happens only once, sung by a couple of pure-voiced men in unison and accompanied by guitars.  The main tune reminds me to a startling degree of certain mid-period Beach Boys songs, most notably “You Still Believe In Me.”  I feel like I should find the song sappy, but I actually find it extremely beautiful.  It makes me imagine a brief reunion between two lovers separated by circumstances beyond their control, late at night in an airy white stucco building in rural Greece or Italy.  (The reunited lovers are actually in the lyrics;  the location is entirely in the music.)  I was definitely not expecting that.