Favorite Song No. 331: Tak Shindo – Bali Ha’i

I don’t think people pay much attention to the Billboard charts these days. The Top 200 album chart certainly isn’t as big a deal today as it was 20 years ago, but it still exists, and still tracks album sales. And while those sales overall may be down since the heyday of the recording industry, music remains as popular as ever, and it’s as impressive to be No. 1 today as it ever was, because the competition is equally fierce, even if sales are lower.

I mention all this because today’s song is a cover of a song from the South Pacific soundtrack, which was a massive hit. From Wikipedia:

In the US, the album stayed at No.1 for seven months – the fourth longest run ever. In the UK, the album… stayed at the top for a record-breaking 115 weeks (the first 70 of these consecutively – including the whole year of 1959), and remained in the top five for 214 weeks.

To put it in perspective, in the first 5 weeks of 2020 there have been 5 different albums in the number one spot. In the 52 weeks last year, 40 different albums occupied the spot. Perhaps its a testimonial to our limited attention span as a society today, but it’s rare lately for an album to spend even two consecutive weeks at number one, so an album spending years plural at number one is something we’ll almost certainly never again see.

This was of course all before my time, and I’ve never even seen the film South Pacific, or listened to the entire soundtrack, but its popularity meant that many artists recorded their own versions of songs, the most-covered of which seems to be “Bali Ha’i.” The version I like best is by Tak Shindo. Shindo made a lot of great music during his lifetime. His album Mganga! is one of my favorite of the “space age jazz” or “exotica” albums I’ve ever heard, and that same sound is on display in his version of “Bail Ha’i.”

As does most of Shindo’s work of the era, this song has a very tropical sound, but at the same time, it sounds kind of spooky, doesn’t it? The whistling, wailing instrumentation would be as fitting in a film about invaders from Saturn as it is in a tiki paradise. It’s that quality that I love most about the song– while definitely evocative of a moonlit stroll on a Polynesian beach, there’s an eerie overtone that makes you feel that at any moment, something unearthly may step out of the jungle behind you.