Jewels Of The Sea

for as long as man beheld the ocean's splendour, inspiration has come with the tides and stayed to work its magic on the imagination. to a composer the sea offers wondrous motion, a shimmering surface of flowing mystery. les baxter gratefully accepted these things, and distilled them into exotic miniatures of dream-like beauty - sparkling, opalescent gems. dreamy, sensual, iridescent, abstracted, this is quintessential les baxter. baxter invented exotica and created the definitive works of the genre, among them ritual of the savage, tamboo!, ports of pleasure, the sacred idol and jewels of the sea. baxter imposed his passion for stravinsky and debussy on escapist travelogue themes to create a unique form of popular music that was far from 'easy listening' in the conventional sense. the depth of baxter's artistry was acknowledged by sun ra, who considered him to be the most adventurous and enlightened post-war composer. his wild inventiveness has made baxter a hero to modern artists as diverse as jello biafra and beck.