Day 214: Les Baxter - Space Escapade

It’s Easter weekend, so I’m taking some liberties. I’ll do shorter and not very elaborate write-ups, I can say it’s because of the time of the season or maybe the lord or something, but really it’s because I’m tired and I’m going away for a few days.

Album cover courtesy of Capitol Records

In honour of another special event, the Artemis II moon mission, I thought I’d listen to a bit more space music, this time from Les Baxter. I listened to a little bit of his stuff the other day but I ended up switching to something else, but before that, my estimation of the album was that it sounded like what a character from Mad Men would listen to with a gin-based cocktail on some amphetamine-based diet pills while pretending to be on a jungle adventure. Today, we’ll be venturing to space.

American composer Les Baxter was born in Texas in 1922, but he moved to California to study music at Pepperdine and stayed there for the rest of his life. He arranged and composed for swing bands before coming up with a new 1950s easy listening genre, exotica, which is sort of world music-sounding lounge music to transport your average 1950s American into a place that seems vaguely foreign but also isn’t any specific location.

Space Escapade was released in 1958 by Baxter, and it’s an interesting one. I’m not getting as much of space as I am more of the Mad Men-style music. He was apparently a prolific film and TV composer and some of his music was featured in the show, so it makes sense. But I think I was expecting something significantly more funky from the cover, the album title and the song titles, as well as whole his schtick of couch-based travel.

It’s jazzy easy listening lounge music that’s very inoffensive and sounds like a product of its time, which is what makes it fun. But I’m knocking off a point for the false advertising, this is Betty Draper goes to the grocery store music, it’s in no way a space escapade. If you’re going for a space theme, I fully believe that you should go full hog, or at the very least half hog. It’s still enjoyable as twinkly instrumentals to have on in the background, but not really anything more than that.

I expected sci-fi and Les didn’t deliver, it’s a 6.5/10.