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Juan Garcia Esquivel (AKA Esquivel!): “Misirlou” / “Malaguena”
From the album Strings Aflame (1959)
It’s impossible to do justice to the universal musical genius of Juan Garcia Esquivel (1918-2002), the Mexican composer, arranger, and bandleader who helped invent the genre sometimes known as “space-age bachelor pad music,” or, less imaginatively, as “lounge.”
Esquivel’s sonic imagination is absolutely unique. He was a man who thought in sound— not in notes or melodies or the other dessicated abstractions in which so many whom we call “composers” dress their meager ideas— but in pure, prismatic sound.
Saccharine string melodies, brassy big-band interjections, exoticist flourishes, the seductive rhythms of Latin-American dance— Esquivel effortlessly juxtaposes sound gestures of radically divergent musical provenance. They follow one another with an inexorable logic, held together against all laws of musical propriety by the sheer manic force that animates each element.
I offer here a two-song medley comprising “Misirlou” and “Malaguena,” both from the 1959 album Strings Aflame. Esquivel’s version of the traditional Greek/Mediterannean tune “Misirlou” predates Dick Dale’s famous “surf rock” rendition by three years. “Malaguena,” based on a movement of the Suite Andalucia by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona which became a popular standard, showcases one of Esquivel’s most bizarre and idiosyncratic techniques: using the voice as a non-verbal sound source to sing repeated monosyllables (in this case, “zu”) instead of words.
Played 39 time(s).
February 23, 2009, 10:16am
