Highly Inventive Jacket Notes Schneider (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. Cover photo, "Matusi Warrior," by George Pickow (illustrator). 1st Edition. Not a book but a 12-inch, 33-1/3 rpm stereo vinyl record album, Omega Records OSL-7, near-mint vinyl in a very-good cardboard jacket. Leon "Chaino" Johnson (1927-1999) was an American bongo player. After touring for several years on the Chitlin' Circuit, he released several albums and became popular with listeners of exotica music in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the promotion of his albums, a fictional biography was developed, depicting Chaino as an orphan from a lost tribe in central Africa who had been rescued by missionaries after his tribe had been massacred. "The boy . . . quickly learned the ways of the white man, but never abandoned his native culture." Chaino was actually born in Philadelphia and raised in Chicago. In 1958, Chaino teamed up with record producer Kirby Allan; the pair released several albums in the late 1950s, the first being "Jungle Mating Rhythms," released by Verve Records in 1958. Chaino and Allan released five additional albums: Percussion for Playboys, Jungle Echoes, Night of the Spectre, Africana, and Temptation. The albums featured Chaino playing bongos, steel drums and other percussion instruments, combined with primal chants and "strains of grunting and howling" that Allan called "sensual primitive music" Seeking to capitalize on the popularity of the exotica genre, the liner notes for Chaino's albums built a mythology of Chaino as an orphan who was "the only survivor of a lost race of people from the wilds of the jungle in a remote part of central Africa where few white men have ever been." Chaino's music enjoyed renewed popularity in the late 1990s as part of the revival of interest in the exotica and ultra lounge genres. In his book, "Mondo Exotica," Francesco Adinolfi wrote that, in Chaino's albums, "exotica found its fullest expression: repeated, driving rhythms, savage cries, and tribal iconography intended to trigger the pagan fantasies of the listener." Reduced from $12.