Les Baxter's Original Quiet Village

QUIET VILLAGE

a treasury of the intriguing, beguiling, tantalizing, spellbinding, evocative, provocative music of

LES BAXTER

In Chicago, respected bank manager Weldon Spring Audit, the father of four, vanished from his home one mid-October evening while the rest of the family was holding a ping-pong tournament in the patio. To date Audit's whereabouts have not been traced, although acquaintances from Elgin, Illinois, whose around-the-world tour afforded them a bracing hour-and-45-minute stopover in Tahiti, reported glimpsing someone who much resembled him sporting a thick black beard, carrying canvas and a fistful of oil paints, and strolling barefoot along the littoral.

At LaGuardia Field, New York, veteran airline pilot "Whizzer" Broadsport, scheduled to make a routine passenger flight to Denver, Colorado, was seen to enter his plane one hour before scheduled takeoff time and, without taking on passengers or receiving clearance from the control tower, head his plane south-southwest. The plane was ultimately discovered, miraculously still afloat, somewhere off the Antipodes, but Broadsport, who had evidently abandoned ship in a raft, has not been heard from since.

In Burbank, California, actor Janus McGorgeous disappeared from his studio dressing room after 20 days of shooting on his latest multi-billion-dollar Biblical epic. No one saw him leave. Months later McGorgeous' costumier received a single, badly-smudged, surface-mail-rate postal card from an obscure African port in the hand-writing of McGorgeous himself, advising that the actor had signed on with a small itinerant Dutch steamship line, and had no wish or intention of ever returning to motion pictures.

These three cases --and other similar ones which but for want of space could be cited-- had one striking feature in common. In the den of Audit's Chicago home, in the living room of "Whizzer" Broadsport's walkup bachelor apartment, in McGorgeous' studio dressing room, silently revolving upon the turntable of a still-operating record player --as though the listener had unpremeditatedly strolled out in mid-playing-- was a recording of the exotic music of Les Baxter. --RORY GUY

You may want to acquire for your collection some or all of the delightful albums from which the above selections were assembled. Just one word of caution: You too may find this music's siren call irresistible!

Les Baxter's Original Quiet Village, Capitol LP ST-1846 © CAPITOL RECORDS, INC.