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Leslie Thompson Baxter (March 14, 1922 – January 15, 1996) was an American musician, composer and conductor. [1] After working as an arranger and composer for swing bands, he developed his own style of easy listening music, known as exotica and scored over 250 radio, television and motion pictures numbers.
The Les Baxter recording was released by Capitol Records as catalog number 2374. It first reached the Billboard magazine charts on March 28, 1953, and lasted 22 weeks on the chart, peaking at #2. [2] In 2023, Les Baxter's version of the song was included on the soundtrack of the 2023 film Asteroid City by Wes Anderson. [3]
The Sacred Idol is an album by Les Baxter and His Orchestra. It was released in 1960 on Capitol Records. [1] [2] The music was composed by Baxter; it was originally intended to be the soundtrack for a film that was never released. [2] Upon its release, Billboard gave the album a rating of four stars and called it "exciting, exotic and colorful ...
The music was a mixture of late 1940s lounge jazz and film music underpinned by Hoffman’s otherworldly theremin playing. According to the liner notes: "Harry Revel created the basic "idea" and themes while Leslie Baxter, conductor and arranger, has given them appropriately unique tone color, using mass harmonies of human voices as well as unusual instrumental effects with woodwinds, strings ...
Baxter claimed Ravel and Stravinsky as influences on his work. [8] In 1957, Martin Denny covered Les Baxter's "Quiet Village", with exotic bird calls and a vibraphone instead of strings, which established the sound of the Polynesian styled music. The song reached #2 on Billboard's charts in 1959 with Denny's Exotica album reaching #1. [9]
A recording of the tune by Les Baxter's orchestra (Capitol Records catalog number 3336, with the flip side "Theme from 'Helen of Troy'") was a number-one hit on the Billboard chart in the US in 1956: for four weeks on the Best Sellers in Stores chart, [5] [6] for six weeks on the Most Played by Jockeys and Hot 100 charts, and for three weeks on the Most Played on Jukeboxes chart.
"Sinner Man" or "Sinnerman" is a song written by Les Baxter and Will Holt, and often performed in the style of an African American traditional spiritual song. It has been recorded by a number of performers and has been incorporated in many other media and arts. The lyrics describe a sinner attempting to hide from divine justice on Judgment Day.
Les Baxter " Quiet Village " is an orchestral pop instrumental that was written and originally performed by Les Baxter in 1951 and an instrumental album from 1959 by Martin Denny . In the liner notes to his album, Ritual of the Savage (Le sacre du sauvage) , Baxter described the themes he was conveying in the work: [ 1 ]