{"id":30745,"date":"2026-03-11T05:30:50","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T09:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=30745"},"modified":"2026-03-12T07:50:04","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T11:50:04","slug":"a-conversation-with-waitiki-7s-randy-wong-part-2-of-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/11\/a-conversation-with-waitiki-7s-randy-wong-part-2-of-2\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation with Waitiki 7\u2019s Randy Wong (Part 2 of 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Continued from Part One<\/a>\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

From my perspective as a listener, exotica is a quintessentially American form because it plunders from a lot of different things. And what could be more American than that, really?<\/b><\/p>\n

Oh, yeah. It came out of the post World War II travel phenomenon. And everyone wanted to escape. Everyone wanted a fantasy. And it\u2019s therefore fitting. Some people want to travel to the Pacific, others want to travel to the Caribbean. Why can\u2019t those two ideas come together in a creative way? The music isn\u2019t indigenous to any particular single genre or country. But maybe it\u2019s indigenous to the escapist construct in our in our minds. Everyone needs an escape. Especially now.<\/p>\n

How do you navigate the line between the serious treatment of the form and what some people would call the kitsch element of it?<\/b><\/p>\n

Well, I think kitsch is a judgment call. You never know what\u2019s going to be a random fact to someone else. We all come from different spaces in different times. What one person\u2019s going to judge is, \u201cI like this song; I don\u2019t like that song. That\u2019s good music, that\u2019s bad music. That\u2019s kitsch, that\u2019s not kitsch.\u201d It\u2019s hard to know what people will think.<\/p>\n

I like to think that it comes down to your artistic intention and how you represent yourself. I\u2019ve learned over the last 20 years that we\u2019ve been doing this music that the bird calls that were done in the original recordings, they all have a certain time and place. They sound random, but they aren\u2019t. There\u2019s actually particular calls that they\u2019re doing for particular songs, so there\u2019s a performance practice to it. Lopaka is he\u2019s recreating his father\u2019s bird and animal calls, and he\u2019s doing it vocally, often without fingers in his mouth, because he\u2019s playing percussion at exactly the same time.<\/p>\n

Why not one, but two new albums in 2025?<\/b><\/p>\n

We have this residency at the Halekulani, which is an exquisite luxury hotel. Part of their belief and strategy is \u201cEverything for the arts.\u201d They support a lot of arts organizations: the Hawaii Symphony, the Hawaii Youth Symphony, the ballet, et cetera. When they invited us to bring exotica back to Waikiki, they became our home. And so then I started thinking, \u201cIf we\u2019re going to be performing live, we might as well also go into the studio right after the shows are done.\u201d And the original idea was to release the two albums \u2013 a live album and a studio album \u2013 only on vinyl. Because vinyl is where the collectors are. And that\u2019s where people who love Exotica are; they\u2019re huge record collectors.<\/p>\n

And then as were going through that process, I started hearing about people who are now only buying music on CD! And then I was talking to other friends, and they said, \u201cKids these days are very into physical media; all these high school kids are also buying CD players. You know, maybe it\u2019s a harder sell to convince your parents to buy you a record player, but somehow you can convince them to buy a CD player. So we were like, \u201cOkay, we\u2019ll put the two albums on CD, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an appropriate milestone and documentation of how far the band has come, and to experience this exotica sound not just in a studio session, but also live. Because that\u2019s the one thing that we don\u2019t have a lot of as collectors and as historians of the music: What do those bands sound like when they\u2019re performing live?<\/p>\n

We do see it sometimes. There was a Martin Denny reissue that had a couple of live tracks. There\u2019s his Live in Japan<\/i> album from the \u201890s \u2013 shortly before he passed \u2013 but it doesn\u2019t really capture what the show was like back in the \u201850s. The music had passed, had become clich\u00e9. You can watch old clips of the Ed Sullivan show and see Arthur Lyman; just briefly, though. So we thought a live album would be apropos.<\/p>\n

After all these years, what do you think explains the enduring appeal of exotica?<\/b><\/p>\n

I think exotica has something for everyone. The original songs tend to be really short; they\u2019re kind of like character pieces. I liken them to when you go and watch Tchaikovsky\u2019s Nutcracker: each short dance is two or three minutes, and you really get the character of it. You get into this zone: \u201cWe\u2019ve got Ports of Paradise, and then the next one we\u2019ve got\u2026\u201d They\u2019re like audio travelogues.<\/p>\n

And when they improvise, it\u2019s in relation to this character they\u2019ve already built up. So it\u2019s not like you\u2019re sitting down and you\u2019re listening to like a 25 minute Coltrane Live in Paris <\/i>with a free jazz solo. That\u2019s a commitment that\u2019s inaccessible to a lot of people. But exotica is instrumental, right? You can have it on in the background. You can have it as a conversation piece. And there\u2019s aspects that are both classical and jazz.<\/p>\n

We have people that frequently come out to the shows who will say, \u201cI have exotica records, but I\u2019ve never heard it live. I also never go and see jazz in a club. I never go out and see chamber music in a museum or something. But I loved your show.\u201d And to me, that really speaks volumes to how music is a great connector. I recall I none of your interviews, an artist said that \u201cMusic is the great unknown architecture that connects the universe.\u201d And that quote really resonated with me, because even if you don\u2019t know what exotica music is, or you don\u2019t know that the genre has a name, it does connect us.<\/p>\n

You may also enjoy my interview with Tikiyaki Orchestra’s Jim Bacchi<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One\u2026 From my perspective as a listener, exotica is a quintessentially American form because it plunders from a lot of different things. And what could be more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30752,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,41,49],"tags":[5855,5854],"class_list":["post-30745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exotica","category-interview","category-new-release","tag-randy-wong","tag-waitiki-7","cat-28-id","cat-41-id","cat-49-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30745"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30926,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30745\/revisions\/30926"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}