Lounge music legend Juan Esquivel transported
easy listening to strange, wonderful destinations
From the pages of CA-Modern magazine
By Jeff Kaliss
In Southern California of the late 1950s and early '60s, there was attention not only to the look of modernity -- in homes, cars, clothing, and beyond -- but also to the sound of it.
The Los Angeles studios and sales rooms of RCA Victor Records were abuzz with the introduction of what the company termed 'Stereophonic Orthophonic High Fidelity,' a dramatic improvement over the monophonic, or one-channel, recordings which had been the mode ever since Nipper the Dog, RCA's long-standing label mascot, had started listening to 'His Master's Voice' a half-century earlier.
In the mid-1950s, RCA imported a composer and arranger from south of the border, Juan Garcia Esquivel, and set him up in L.A. to record an album, compatible with both old mono and new stereo systems. Esquivel, at this point, was unfamiliar in the U.S., though he'd gained notice as a pyrotechnic pianist and writer of music for radio in Mexico.
But Esquivel made the kind of music that would make folks go out and buy stereos -- just for the thrill of hearing him deliver the new dual sound with maximum effect. His first American-made album for RCA, 'Other Worlds, Other Sounds' (1958), radiated the post-Sputnik spirit of the times, with a tightly clad, ethereal female on the cover, posed amidst lunar craters. Inside were equally spacey musical arrangements, applied to familiar American pop and Latin tunes but in a manner that highlighted the advantages of listening to two separate channels over two speakers.
The album helped secure the appeal not only of stereo systems but also of Esquivel himself, who would remain in the U.S. for the next 20 years, as a recording artist for RCA and then Reprise, a contract composer for TV and film, and a long-term lounge act in Las Vegas. Along the way, the dynamic and innovative Mexican also attracted friends, colleagues, fans, women in and out of wedlock, and seven Grammy nominations.
Esquivel returned to his native land two decades later, but like even so many of the acoustic oracles of mid-century modern, he began emerging from the dust of America's used record bins before the turn of the millennium.
Steve Reed was among Esquivel's first crop of U.S. fans. As a Beverly Hills high schooler in the late '50s, he'd been listening to 'Other Worlds' on local station KMPC and searching for the artist's other albums. "There was nothing to which one could compare this," Reed, now 69, recalls of Esquivel and his music. "And it took a lot of courage from Esquivel, and from his backers, RCA, putting these heretofore unheard-of combinations of sound out there."
Esquivel's incomparability makes him difficult to describe, but Irwin Chusid, who has produced reissues for both the Bar/None and BMG labels, is well qualified to give it a try. "There was almost a musical Morse code in Esquivel's arrangements, where he would leave a lot of things out," says Chusid. "If Esquivel just put a couple of 'zu-zu-zus' and 'pow-pow-pows' and a couple of words [from the mouths of the Randy Van Horne Singers] which were a reduction from the original lyric, it was interesting that you would still know the song."
On record and in live performance, Esquivel's impact was fueled partly by his keyboard virtuosity, which he'd begun showcasing as a pre-teen, over Mexico City radio station XEW in the early 1930s. A few years later, the young prodigy was setting scenes for a popular radio comedian and learning to juxtapose the ranges and dynamics of different instruments.
Early on, he was subsuming his Latin roots within a more global sound, gleaned from shortwave radio. By the early '50s, samples of Esquivel's approach, which he'd christened 'Sonorama,' were being sent to New York by RCA's Mexican music director. Towards the end of the decade, the company decided to move this classy resource up north.
Young Steve Reed was thrilled when he found out "that I was going to have the opportunity to watch this genius" performing in a trio context at a West Hollywood club called the Melody Room. Within a few weeks, Reed, who was studying Spanish, was addressing his idol-turned-friend as 'Juan' and introducing him to Los Angeles and some of its denizens, including a Melody Room cocktail waitress named Joyce, who would become Esquivel's musical collaborator and second wife.
Possessed of seemingly boundless stamina, Esquivel held down a day job writing incidental music for Universal/Revue Studios TV shows, where his inherently dramatic approach to composition and arrangement were put to good use. He also composed the brief but perennially lucrative jingle that concluded each and every Universal TV production.
Esquivel's recordings never reached the high bar established at RCA by Harry Belafonte and Elvis Presley, but they set a standard of production that attracted the participation of top-drawer engineers and musicians. Esquivel, himself trained as an engineer in Mexico, wrote charts for both those sets of professionals. For the engineers, "there were cues, accenting the mikes in certain parts of the orchestra to pick up obscure sounds," says Reed, who kept his friend company in the studio.
Not surprisingly, Esquivel sought out modern homesteads in the Los Angeles area after he'd gotten past apartment living. His first MCM residence, according to Reed, was above Hollywood near Benedict Canyon, and he later moved to a similar home belonging to wife Joyce's sister and her husband, in Sherman Oaks.
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.
Esquivel returned to RCA the next year, and appeared to be reaffirming his south-of-the-border identity on Latin-Esque, but that album also served to launch the record company's 'Stereo Action' series, "the first time in the history of stereo recording in which absolute separation of channels has been achieved," according to the liner notes. The achievement, under Esquivel's direction at RCA's spacious studios, involved two sets of musicians separated by the length of a city block but interconnected by headphones and closed-circuit television. Sinatra may well have been influential, soon after this experiment, in convincing Esquivel to put aside recording and set up a successful and long-lasting live show in Las Vegas.
At the Stardust on the Las Vegas strip, where his name, followed by an exclamation mark, was ensconced on the casino's space-age neon-illuminated sign, Esquivel was successful in luring gamers away from the slots and card tables and fellow performers from their own showplaces.
For the Stardust, Esquivel mined many of the arrangements from his recordings, but presented them with a much smaller instrumental ensemble, bolstered by an electronic organ. In place of the Randy Van Horne Singers were four female vocalists, one of whom, Yvonne de Bourbon, ultimately took on additional roles, as Esquivel's third wife and business manager. The visual component of 'The Sights and Sounds of Esquivel!,' as the show was dubbed, was enhanced by colored lighting and by elaborate and expensive costumes. Esquivel worked the show the way he worked everything -- with passion, precision, and tight control.
When investment and control in Vegas shifted from the more flamboyant Mob to penny-pinching commercial interests, Esquivel fell out of favor. And after his divorce from Yvonne in 1978, the 68-year-old was ready to return to Mexico and a life of far less public activity. There he scored a different sort of success, composing and recording themes for a popular children's TV show called 'Burbujas' ('Bubbles'), which resulted in two good-selling albums. By this time, Esquivel's earlier LP's for RCA and Reprise had been consigned to garage sales and cheap-o bins of used record stores, where they were usually classified, ironically, as easy listening.
Among those flipping through the record store bins of L.A. in that era was a young animator named Byron Werner. "I was purposely seeking out optimistic music," he says, "because [rock] music in the '70s was getting pretty cynical, and everyone's hipness was getting in the way of their fun level." Cruising back in time a couple of decades to the so-called space age, Werner found not only Esquivel but other proponents of what was sometimes called 'exotica,' a subgenre of what was later collectively dubbed 'lounge music.' Werner's discoveries included Martin Denny (of 'Quiet Village' fame), Les Baxter, Bob Thompson, and Henri Rene.
Werner assembled a tape compilation of his discoveries, for which he coined the phrase 'space-age bachelor pad music.' He began sharing his tapes with fellow animators, including Zap Comix veteran Robert Williams and future 'Simpsons' creator Matt Groening, as well as with other members of a light-hearted assemblage of fanciful thinkers who called themselves the 'Church of the SubGenius.'
Werner also personally brought a tape to 'independent freeform' radio station WFMU in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he caught the ear of volunteer deejay Irwin Chusid. "It was very impressive, it was fun, it was sparkly, it was animated, it was sophisticated, it was intriguing, it was exotic," Chusid recalls. "It had all these amazing qualities which I, up 'til then, had not associated with the genre known as easy listening music."
In Los Angeles, Werner was visited by touring Boston-based punk musician Brother Cleve (who'd reversed Esquivel's approach to stage names by eliminating his surname). Werner recognized another chance to turn on a fellow member of the Church of the SubGenius (as was Chusid) to Esquivel and easy listening. "Much to my surprise, I discovered that there was a whole other side of [easy listening] that was more psychedelic than any psychedelic music I had ever heard," testifies Cleve.
Back in Boston, Cleve became aware, in the early '90s, of the growth of a subculture that embraced retro easy listening music and exotica, along with the associated symbols of Tikis and faux Polynesia. This collection of 20-and-30-somethings gave rise to a band, Combustible Edison, and a trendy lifestyle calling itself 'The Cocktail Nation.' Oddly evocative of the Mob-managed Vegas of three decades earlier, they wore sleek retro outfits, sipped martinis, smoked little cigars, and began seeking the sounds of Henry Mancini, Martin Denny, and the harder-to-find Esquivel who, unbeknownst to Esquivel himself, was ready for a revival.
With his connections in the record business, Chusid had been shopping around the material he'd received from Werner, and he eventually turned to Bar/None, a label based nearby him in Hoboken, with the blessing of RCA, who held the rights to most of Esquivel's catalogue. To help celebrate the New York City release of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music CD in 1994, Chusid (who produced the album) enlisted Combustible Edison. Cleve, the band's keyboard player, quickly penned some Esquivel-style charts, and the resulting concert was covered in Rolling Stone magazine and on WABC-TV. 'Bachelor Pad Music' sold way beyond expectations, and Bar/None and RCA followed up with two more Esquivel compilations and a series of reissues of the original LP's in CD format.
Through the efforts of a curious fan, Bar/None became aware that Esquivel himself was still alive, though confined to a bed due to an old spinal injury (sustained while horsing around with Joyce in 1961), compounded by a broken hip and arthritis. Cleve was dispatched to visit the rediscovered legend and to facilitate his musical output, at his brother Sergio's house in the little town of Jiutepec, near Cuernavaca. Cleve brought MIDI equipment with him, but spent the first three days just talking with his idol and perusing archival recordings and other memorabilia.
Esquivel revealed himself to Cleve as having been a proponent of the forward-looking culture of his time. "I saw photos of his home in Beverly Hills, with the swimming pool, etcetera, and he definitely had modernist taste," says Cleve. "He had a certain amount of mid-century furniture -- and I know he had a starburst clock, and the latest in transistor radios. And he drove big-finned Cadillacs. He bought a new one every year."
With a return visit to Jiutepec shortly thereafter, Cleve collaborated with Esquivel on several new compositions, a new Christmas-themed album, and reissues. Irwin Chusid also came down with an offer to manage Esquivel's business affairs, a service that had been unprovided (and mostly unneeded) for many years.
Chusid helped reawaken Hollywood and others to Esquivel's value, and the sounds of Sonorama started showing up in a variety of films, cartoons, and advertisements. But Chusid noted that Esquivel "clearly was not happy with the state he was in -- a man who had been vibrant, a bon vivant, very much alive. To suddenly be rediscovered, I know he felt a personal tragedy that he couldn't capitalize on it from a personal standpoint."
Still, the refreshed influx of care and respect must have brightened Esquivel's last years. He passed away in 2002, a couple of weeks short of his 84th birthday, attended by his nurse-turned-fourth-wife Carina. His legacy was celebrated both in a 2004 documentary and in 'Homenaje' ('Homage'), a concert in Mexico City two years later. Brother Cleve carefully reconstructed Esquivel's arrangements from his recordings (the original charts had perished) and performed them in a tribute to the master at the Teatro de la Ciudad with Waitiki, a 21-piece band out of Boston.
Steve Reed flew down for the concert and sat next to Mario Esquivel, Juan's son, in the packed theater. "The feeling that went through you was, 'My god, he's alive!'" says Reed, who today remains enthusiastic about more tribute concerts, reissues, and even a statue yet to come. The vitality of Juan Garcia Esquivel will not soon be lost to a world that needs it more than ever.
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