Dear David,
I received your letter dated Oct. 30th and am pleased to know that a new generation has picked up on my sounds.
In my career I have recorded 38 LPs dating back to 1957. Just recently I recorded my first live CD for Toshiba EMI that was released in Japan as of May 30th. I did a tour of Japan in late June with a group that had recorded with me including some of the original members. I gave five performances in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka which were received very favorably mostly by a young audience. The name of the CD is called EXOTICA '90.
For the present it is only released in Japan. I got a tremendous amount of publicity in Japan and a lot of exposure and am slated for return appearances in Japan in Spring of 1991.
In 1989 they released two CDs of some of my early recordings. As of this month a CD and cassette of some of my early recordings is being released by Rhino Records.
So you can see there has been a great deal of interest in my music being revived again. One of my former musicians Hagood Hardy lives in Toronto and is very well known in Canada. He spent several years with me playing vibraphone and arranging.
The Mystery Flute
Denny fan David discovered an interesting mystery on his copy of Exotica Today:
I found a copy of Exotica Today not too long ago -- admittedly, not MD's greatest stuff, but it's ok -- and when I was playing it I noticed a weird recording glitch. I think it's on the second side in one of the first two songs. It sounds like during the mastering somebody leaned on the tape reel or hit a high speed button for a split second and it causes the flute part to freak out.
So my question is this: how common is this, for those of you who know the record? Is this the elusive upside-down-airplane-stamp of the Martin Denny catalog? Did Liberty press all of the records with this error, just too cheap to remaster the thing? Anybody know? There's nothing visibly wrong with the record, and there's nothing wrong with my turntable.
The weird blip is on "Strangers in the Night," the first song on side 2, right in the middle of the song. Upon further listening, I realize that it's probably not as audible as I remembered it being upon first listen. I'm a musician, so I hear tuning differences better than most people. But nevertheless it IS there, and flute, drums and all go up almost a semitone for a split second.
I would have sent it back to the mastering plant. (or refused to have paid the engineer).
D Trezza sent along this note and picture.
A friend of mine scanned the autograph from my thrift store find of 20 Golden Hawaiian Hits. The quality isn't the greatest, nor did he get the whole cover, but if you wanna use it on the Temple, feel free to.
Well, the Temple thinks it is just fine and watch us turn green with envy at finding an autographed copy in a thrift store....