Exotica

Exotica is a musical genre that was popular during the 1950s to mid-1960s with Americans who came of age during World War II. The term was coined by Simon "Si" Waronker of Liberty Records, after the 1957 Martin Denny album Exotica.

The Exotica style was largely instrumental and combined American jazz and pop music with influences from Indigenous music of Oceania, Southeast Asia, Hawaii, the Amazon basin, the Andes, the Caribbean and tribal Africa. However, exotica was not intended as a faithful version of these other musical traditions: Denny described the musical style as "a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient...what a lot of people imagined the islands to be like...it's pure fantasy though." While the South Seas forms the core region, exotica reflects the "musical impressions" of every place from standard travel destinations to the mythical "shangri-las" dreamt of by armchair safari-ers.