Terry Snyder & The All Stars: Persuasive Percussion (1958)
As a child in the late 60s and early 70s, I had the misfortune of growing up in a rock-free household. Wonderful parents, yes, but not rock people, leaving me to discover the music that would grow into a life-long obsession all on my own.
What we did have was a lot of lite-jazz, film soundtracks, and adult pop -- the Carpenters, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, Henry Mancini. And a bunch of lounge music from Enoch Light, a musician and recording engineer who ran a studio that put out Light's albums as well as various like-minded outfits. Persuasive Percussion is the album I best remember, not for its lightweight non-confrontational jazz music so much as for the overall sound and vibe of the album. The record was an early adopter of stereo in a mono age, and went all in by clearly separating each instrument into separate channels. I remember when my father bought one of the first quadrophonic sound systems, decades before surround-sound stereos made the technology obsolete, and he'd pop in these 8-tracks tapes of Persuasive Percussion and other Enoch Light productions, and you could listen to the snare drums bop around the room from speaker to speaker. Like the music itself, it was very kitschy.
Anyway, if you're throwing a retro-styled party, serving martinis and Manhattans amidst high-minded debates over your latest Roy Lichtenstein prints, Persuasive Percussion (and follow-up releases like Provocative Percussion), with the drums and marimbas bouncing around the apartment, is the way to go.
(By the sixties, the production outfit would be releasing albums full of moog synthesizers and bizarre mambo-styled covers of pop and rock hits, all of which are essential parts of your faux hipster collection.)
Get in the mood with "I Surrender Dear":
Perhaps a little "Tabu"?
Volume 2 -- the soundtrack of my childhood. I still listen to it. The musicianship is off the scales. Swingin' hard!
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