The EM Poll

Space Age Pioneer

Sep 15, 2006 7:47 PM, By Michael Molenda

           

Juan Garcia Esquivel's Martian party music was really ahead of its time.

This article originally appeared in the September 1996 issue of Electronic Musician.

He is the hippest of the hepcats, the patron saint of the cocktail nation, and one of the most twisted arrangers ever to wield pencil and staff paper. He is Juan Garcia Esquivel, the pasha of space-age bachelor pad music -- the mellow, mostly instrumental soundtrack for the current renaissance of martinis, lounges, and tiki parties.

Although Esquivel's stylistic genre is unabashed mood music, his records are far from lame snoozefests -- they are just too weird. The mad maestro replaced song lyrics with "zu-zus," "rah-rahs," and other exotic syllables, experimented with early electronic devices such as the theremin and ondioline, and was so obsessive about stereo separation that he split an orchestra into two different recording studios.

Even more astounding, however, is that in the days before synthesis made sound layering a musician's birthright, Esquivel used conventional instrumentation to produce exquisitely unusual sounds. But as strange as Esquivel's alien soundscapes must have appeared to record buyers in the late 1950s, the maestro had been working toward the extraordinary from a very early age.

Born in 1918, Esquivel signed on for his first professional gig at 14 and was conducting, composing, and arranging for his own 22 piece orchestra by the time he was 18. The musical prodigy's radio broadcasts and concerts soon made him one of the most popular band leaders in his native Mexico. In 1958, a visionary executive at RCA brought Esquivel to Hollywood to help the label exploit the wonders of its Sonorama stereo technology. Although the RCA executive may not have known what he was in for --Esquivel's commitment to perfection made him an unrepentant budget buster -- the maestro's sojourn in America was incredibly successful.

The futuristic arranger earned three consecutive Grammy nominations (1958 60) in both the Orchestral and Engineering categories, arranged and conducted for other artists, such as the Ames Brothers, and composed numerous television soundtracks and short mood pieces. Those underscores are still used to this day, adding a touch of the bizarre to popular TV fodder such as House of Style, Miami Vice, Columbo, Baywatch, and Murder, She Wrote. In addition, his arrangement of the song "Sentimental Journey" was used in one of television's classic comedy skits: the madcap office furniture ballet "choreographed" by Ernie Kovacs.

In 1962, Esquivel took a 5 year break from recording to perform in a smash nightclub act, "The Sights and Sounds of Esquivel." Not surprisingly, the production was ahead of its time, using undulating lighting that predated the hippies' psychedelic light shows.

Recently, Esquivel has fallen -- literally -- on tough times. In July 1993, the maestro fell and broke his hip, leaving him bedridden for months. (The fall also aggravated an old spinal injury, and corrective surgery was too risky an option.) Then, the day before I spoke with him in January 1996, he slipped out of his lounge chair and fractured his wrist. The consummate hipster's polite, stately demeanor was such that I didn't realize he was medicated and in pain until, 30 minutes into the interview, he requested we reschedule our conversation. A week later, Esquivel was again happily detailing past sessions, slinging anecdotes, and discussing the future. Despite his infirmities and advanced age, the man refuses to retire. At 78 years old, he is working on arrangements for an album he plans to record in the U.S. later this year.

It's all so easy now, isn't it? Today's electronic musician is literally handed an enormous palette of sounds.
Oh yes, with the synthesizer I believe you can produce almost anything. If I had them many years ago, I wouldn't have needed to work so hard to make the sounds I had in my head. But I think that people using synths now should be more selective. Too many musicians rely on presets rather than making their own sounds.

You managed to produce some pretty far out sounds without the benefit of synthesis. How did you develop such otherworldly tones?
It was a very long and tedious job. Obviously, I didn't have the electronic equipment we have now, so I had to produce these different sounds purely with instrumental arrangements. I was trying to achieve with conventional in¬struments these strange sounds that I had in my mind.

For example, I would ask a tenor saxo¬phonist to play a melody, and then I'd have the viola play the same melody si¬multaneously. I was layering sounds. Of course, in this instance, the sound of the sax would overpower the viola, and that was not the sound I wanted. So I would ask the sax player to tone it down. When the saxophonist played softer, the tone would match with the viola better, and the combined sound would be closer to the idea I had. I was always experimenting. Once, I asked a trumpet player to play a solo using a mute. It wasn't quite the sound I wanted, so I asked him to put his hand over the bell and move it around. I was starting from scratch, you see, so it was a lot of work to realize my ideas. However, it was also very rewarding because I could see and hear, right there in the studio, all my theories about sound brought to life.

So you actually did all these experiments in the studio while you were recording your albums?
Oh, no. Before I made a recording, I would have everything written out. This is why I insisted on so many rehearsals. It was during these rehearsals that I experimented with sound, and I always needed more time. I would rehearse ten or twelve hours a day with a big orchestra. These sessions were just for me to take notes and see what combinations of instruments produced the sounds I wanted. When something was right, I would keep careful notes on how the sounds were combined. I found that out of ten experiments, maybe two or three would be good. Every day, I'd start experimenting with new ideas. I rehearsed for close to four years to find the proper unisons and to determine what worked well and what didn't.