It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Boink

Space Age Bachelor Pad Music
Esquivel!
Bar None

In considering the work of Mexican arranger/composer/bandleader Juan Garcia Esquivel, one is reminded of the words of Edd “Kookie” Burns, who said it best when he remarked: “Wowsville, daddy-o!”

Simplemente Esquivel

Of course, he was speaking in an entirely different context, but the sentiment remains apt. The 14 tracks on Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, a reissue of some of Esquivel’s most distinctive recordings, are stubbornly resistant to categorization. Even Esquivel has trouble describing Esquivel! music; one of his three originals is titled “Whatchamacallit.”

It is appropriate during this so-called “easy listening revival” that Esquivel’s genius should be finally recognized. While such trend-spotters as Newsweek have proclaimed that a “cocktail nation” is bubbling away among disaffected grungers, most of the bands comprising it seem to be under the misapprehension that merely donning evening dress and turning down the amps is all that’s required to be considered a happening sophisticate. Even a cursory listen to Bachelor Pad should reveal that being “easy” isn’t that easy.

A contemporary of that avatar of exotica, Martin Denny (whose 1957 hit, “Quiet Village,” with its human-produced jungle animal noises and Polynesian instrumentation, began the craze for hypnotic “tiki” sounds), Esquivel released a series of instrumental albums beginning in 1957 and continuing through 1968. While this era coincides with rock ‘n’ roll’s wildest pre-teen years, you wouldn’t know it from listening to this record.

Most of the songs on Bachelor Pad were familiar middle-of-the-road standards long before Esquivel got to them. His versions, however, are at once familiar and utterly foreign. In Esquivel’s hands, “Harlem Nocturne” sounds as if the arranger took the A train uptown via Saturn