The Boys in the Spacey Lounge: Esquivel-Alvino Rey Connection

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Esquivel's music is like no other space age pop.

While most other orchestral pop arranger/composers of the late 1950s were broadening their classical, big band, and ballroom roots for the age of high fidelity and stereo, Esquivel seemed to spring full formed into the genre. Indeed, his roots were far from the ballroom, having perfected his style writing soundtracks for a popular Mexican radio comedian.

He had more in common with

Carl Stalling

than

Glenn Miller

and his influences ranged from

Alvino Rey

Stan Kenton

Yma Sumac

and

Billy May

Who but Esquivel could bring the entire orchestra to full stop to spotlight a single measure of Alvino Rey's

gwa-gwa slide guitar.

And not just for a final climax
-- that would be just the beginning.

Whole songs are punctuated repeatedly with a variety of

guitar slides
layered brass arpeggios
piano romps
shifting tempos
and
vocal nonsense

If orchestral pop music were painting,

Esquivel was its Van Gogh
(a comparison he made himself).

He was

fearless, he was

shameless

Esquivel

perfected the kitchen sink school of arranging:

why settle for just one sound where ten would do?

In just a few bars a veritable rain of instruments showered down on the listener,

often instruments that had never been heard before on the same song.

Yet unlike the horde of arrangers who rushed to add

ondioline

harpsichord

and

theremin

to the same old big band sound,

Esquivel's arrangements were all of a piece, fresh and never gimmicky.

Esquivel preferred recording and performing arrangements of already-familiar tunes.

"Often I deliberately chose songs that were well-known so the audience could appreciate the arrangements,"

he said recently.

"It's like taking a doll and dressing it any way you want:

or
in

different costumes

or

drawing on her a mustache

,

making her smoke a cigar

or

presenting her in the nude.

It's something familiar, suddenly being presented in a way that's very different and exciting."

In his own compositions, Esquivel proved that he could write a killer hook.

After listening to Esquivel, other composers seem positively timid.

Pianist/composer/arranger Juan Garcia Esquivel was a favorite artist in Mexico City before RCA Victor brought him to the United States in 1958. As is typically the case, the early Mexican sides are his most interesting. (Some are available on the U.S. release To Love Again.) Most of the subsequent U.S. albums were expensive, elaborate experiments in recording technique. While most such albums relied heavily on cheesy, channel-separation gimmickry, Esquivel's maintained a consistently high level of musical intrigue as well as comical wonder. A native of Tampico, Mexico, Esquivel gave up engineering to play the piano on the radio. His first radio performance --fifteen minutes of fame to be-- was at the age of fourteen. Three years later he formed a small group which was heralded for its originality, and by 1940 he was composing for his own orchestra and chorus. By 1954, when he had become a popular recording artist in Mexico, he began to experiment with the "other" sounds that would become his trademark. In addition to "accent" instruments such as the theremin, the Esquivel sound is distinguished mainly by the slide guitar of Alvino Rey. Rey had been a master innovator and orchestra leader (while playing steel guitar!) himself. The other chiefly Esquivellian sound was a "wordless chorus" singing nonsense syllables.

Here's how trade mag Billboard describes the sound:

"...Wild enough to perk up the most jaded set of ears, it's zany big-band music that utilises such unusual components as theremin, ondioline, steel guitar (by Alvino Rey) and even whistling (by Muzzy Marcellino)."

Esquivel-mania has taken the world by storm. So many rock fans have bought these strange records, they are known as "grunge on the rocks".

Esquivel's current home--Mexican "Villa del Descanso"

In 1958, RCA again showcased Esquivel and their still-new technology on 'Exploring New Sounds in Stereo.' Esquivel grinned from the LP's cover with impish appeal, sporting thick-rimmed glasses (in the style of a contemporary, rock 'n' roller Buddy Holly) and leaning on a telescope. His love of gadgetry extended into his instrumentation, which included such pioneering electric and electronic musical devices as the theremin and the ondioline. Additional unexpected and unfamiliar instruments played a part, including the harpsichord, chromatically tuned bongos, and the buzzimba (struck with mallets but sounding like a bull-froggy clarinet). The arranger's abiding love of exotic global tones was audible in his use of Brazilian, Greek, and Chinese percussion on 'Exploring New Sounds.'

And slithering through this acoustic garden of earthly and astral delights was the electric guitar of Alvino Rey.

But gimmicks and glitz aside, there was ample evidence of Esquivel's thorough grounding in the elements of the big band arrangements that, over the previous three decades, had evolved in the States and then spread around the world. Esquivel was a particular fan of Stan Kenton and of Kenton arranger Pete Rugolo, and had no problem attracting L.A.'s best big band and session players to his projects, which continued with two LP volumes of 'Infinity in Sound' in 1960. Among Esquivel's many admirers in the music business was Frank Sinatra, whose recorded repertoire to date gave proof that he knew a good arranger and an evocative arrangement when he heard one. Sinatra made his new label, Reprise, available in 1961 for the release of Esquivel's 'More of Other Worlds, Other Sounds,' which clearly echoed American big band influence. In Hollywood, Esquivel worked on such shows as Markham, The Tall Man, and the Bob Cummings Show. He recorded many short music pieces for Universal TV, which were used in the soundtracks of TV Sitcoms.

At times,

The Esquivel Orchestra

had such men as:

Stan Getz: sax
Laurindo Almieda: guitar,
Alvino Rey: steel guitar.
Muzzy Marcelino: often as a whistler.
Pete Condoli in the trumpets.
Frank Rosolino.
George Roberts: bass trombone.
Larry Bunker: drums and also bongos.
Jack Castanzo: bongos
Joe Loco.
Buddy Cole: Organ (later had his own orchestra.)
The Randy Van Horne Singers vocal group.

All the arrangements
all the vocals
and combo arrangements
were always done by
Juan Esquivel.

Among the men whom Esquivel admired and who may have influenced him were Pete Rugolo, the arranger for the Stan Kenton orchestra. Esquivel loved his "Artistry in Rhythm" and often played that record while he was still living in Mexico City. He dreamed of having the ability to write for the trumpets the way that Pete Rugolo did. Among other musicians he admired were Lalo Schifrin, Johnny Williams, and Henry Mancini. Esquivel considered Stan Kenton and Henry Mancini to be true musical geniuses. In 1992, Esquivel visited his brother in Mexico City. Exiting a taxicab, he fell and fractured his hip, aggravating an old spinal injury.

He has been confined to bed ever since.

Rey also became one of the most influential and distinctive session men of the exotica era, lending his guitar to sessions from

Esquivel, George Cates and countless others

also teamed with Jack Constanzo and other session aces in the Martin Denny-inspired group the Surfmen.

In the mid-1960s, Rey joined the ever-expanding King Family group on a television variety show which enjoyed a healthy run of five seasons, concurrently producing a series of LPs featuring the program's cast.

Amazingly, he also continued performing well into his '80s, leading a band that played Disneyland each year from the theme park's opening onward.

The swing and exotica stalwart

passed away

March 2, 2004
at his

Salt Lake City, UT

home.

Alvino Rey's latter-day tenure with the

King Sisters

variety show on ABC television,

his important collaborations with

Juan Garcia Esquivel,

and his incognito adventures as Warner Brothers' recording artist

Ira Ironstrings

~ Wordless Chorus

"Wordless chorus" means a [usually]female voice or voices singing nonsense syllables, humming, or otherwise ululating. This so-called background instrument was popular in the 1960s, when the advertising wisdom "sex sells" applied to everything. What better way to show off the new hi-fi stereo than the sound of an idle young woman's voice bouncing from channel to channel? Later 1960s television commercials used this technique extensively, for instance in some versions of "Music to Watch Girls By." King of the wordless chorus was Esquivel, whose astounding "zu-zu-zu-zu" and "pow!" choruses run throughout most of his work. Second to him is Bob Thompson, "the poor man's Esquivel" and an arranger with advertising in his blood (although adding the chorus in Thompson's case was an RCA producer's idea). There are hundreds of albums with wordless chorus, and many exotic albums use eerie, abstract, female voice as a "sirenish" touch. It's just fun, trivial music for swingin' playboys.

Jerry Byrd's Guitar Magic

Pop guitar starts and nearly ends with Roy Smeck. Disciples and peers ranged from Arthur Godfrey and Cliff Edwards (Ukulele Ike) to Billy Mure, while Les Paul somehow got credit for several Smeck milestones. Roy Smeck did everything from the serious to the gimmicky, including playing guitars with teeth and behind back, long before anyone else. And he did it with style, class, and humility, night after night on the Vaudeville circuit and all day in practice. He helped make the steel guitar equally at home on Gene Autry records as Hawaiian. Roy Smeck, with the unlikely name and no rock-star looks, remains the original guitar hero. Bandleader and steel-guitar hero Alvino Rey found a second career in playing slide guitar, notably for Esquivel