What is Lounge Music ?

Lounge music is a retrospective description of music popular in the 1950s and 1960s encompassing the exotica, easy listening, and space age pop genres. It is a type of mood music meant to evoke in the listeners the feeling of being in a place — a jungle, an island paradise, outer space, et cetera — other than where they are listening to it. [1] The range of lounge music encompasses beautiful music-influenced instrumentals, modern electronica (with chillout, Nu-jazz and downtempo influences), whilst remaining thematically focused on its retro-space-age cultural elements. The earliest type lounge music appeared during the 1920s and 1930s, and was known as Light music. Contemporaneously, the term lounge music also denotes the types of music played in hotels (the lounge, the bar), casinos, and piano bars.

Retrospective usage

Exotica, space-age pop, and some forms of easy listening music popular during the 1950s and 1960s are now broadly termed lounge. The term lounge does not appear in textual documentation of the period, such as Billboard magazine or long playing album covers, but has been retrospectively applied.

While rock and roll was generally influenced by blues and country, lounge music was derived from jazz and other musical elements borrowed from traditions around the world.

Exotica from such artists Les Baxter, Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman sold millions of records during its heydey. It combined music that was popular outside the USA, such as various Latin genres (e.g., Bossa Nova, Cha-Cha-Cha, Mambo), Polynesian, French, etc. into a relaxed,[2] palatable sound. Such music could have some instruments exaggerated (e.g., a Polynesian song might have an exotic percussion arrangement using bongos, and vocalists imitating wild animals.) Many of these recordings were portrayed as originating in exotic foreign lands, but in truth were recorded in Hollywood recording studios by veteran session musicians. Another genre, space age pop, mimicked space age sound effects of the time and reflected the public interest in space exploration. With the advent of stereophonic technology, artists such as Esquivel used spatial audio techniques to full effect, creating whooshing sounds with his orchestra.

A good deal of lounge music was pure instrumental (i.e., no main vocal part, although there could be minor vocal parts). Sometimes, this music would be theme music from movies or TV shows, although such music could be produced independently from other entertainment productions. These instrumentals could be produced with an orchestral arrangement, or from an arrangement of instruments very similar to that found in jazz, or even rock and roll such as the Hammond Organ or electric guitar.