Music: Mood Merchant

A conch shell wailed, the conga drums thump-thumped, the bamboo sticks clattered. The four men on stage were constantly on the move—clacking wooden blocks, scratching a corrugated gourd, flailing away at Chinese gongs, weaving rhythms that were insistent, sinuous and hypnotic. Occasionally, when the spirit moved them, they barked like seals or whooped like cranes. The happy audience at Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel rattled the rafters whooping back.

Many a stereo bug could recognize the sounds immediately—and name the man who was making them. At 29, Arthur Lyman and his group of Hawaiian musicians are staples of the pop-record market. One album alone, titled Taboo, has sold close to 2,000,000 copies, and Lyman fans buy each new effort (Yellow Bird, Hawaiian Sunset, Taboo Vol. 2) with the enthusiasm of rare-stamp collectors. Back home in Hawaii, Lyman’s mistily exotic mood music has been copied with varying success by a dozen groups. It draws tourists by the gross to the Shell Bar in the Hawaiian Village Hotel, where Lyman holds forth when he is not on tour (and where television’s Hawaiian Eye show, on which Lyman has appeared, often stops for a drink). With record sales and the kind of capacity crowds he was drawing last week, Lyman will make about $120,000 this year.

A Little to Drink. The group’s repertory is varied and immense—300 songs ranging from Israeli folk music to rock ‘n’ roll. By the time Lyman has finished arranging them, however—building in parts for castanets, chimes, tambourines, cow bells and even the jawbone of an ass—they all take on the same exotic, Oriental flavor. To give listeners the impression that they are in the rain forests of Brazil, Lyman and his men cut loose at regular intervals with what they hope are authentic bird cries. At its best, the group has a delicate, haunting sound that none of its imitators can match.

Arthur Lyman was born on the island of Kauai, the youngest of eight children of a Hawaiian mother and a father of French, Belgian and Chinese extraction. When Arthur’s father, a riveter, lost his eyesight in an accident, the family moved to the island of Oahu and settled in Makiki, a section of Honolulu. Arthur’s introduction to music was on a toy marimba. Each day after school, Arthur’s father put some old Benny Goodman records on the phonograph and locked Arthur in his room with orders to “play along with the records for the rest of the day.” Arthur “hated it” but he also learned: “I mastered every [Lionel] Hampton solo.”

By the time he was 14, Lyman was good enough to play with a combo in a Honolulu jazz cellar; from there he graduated to the Martin Denny Trio, which plays music something like Lyman’s but with more of a jazz feeling. About that time, he married a divorcee from Sacramento, Calif., who still serves as his group’s business manager.

Not Like a Bird. It was while he was with Denny that Lyman discovered the value of bird calls. One night, he recalls, he had “a little to drink,” and when the trio began playing the theme from the movie Vera Cruz, he tried a few experimental squawks. “The next thing you know,” says he, “the audience started to answer me back with all kinds of weird cries. It was great.”

It was so great, in fact, that it became Lyman’s trademark when he started his own group. He never rehearses his calls. “There’s really nothing to it: you just open your mouth and yell a little bit.” But not everybody can do it. For some reason, Lyman says without malice, Martin Denny could never sound like a bird.