Announcing The Atomic Age Cocktail Party

The music itself goes by a lot of names: Lounge, Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, music of the Rat Pack era, easy listening, orchestrated pop, cocktail music, exotica, and many others. It’s basically popular musical from the middle part of the 20th century.

The show covers roughly the years from 1955 to 1965; after the end of the Big Band Era and before the dominance of Rock and Roll. It was a time when changes in recording technology and commercially available home systems made for more dynamic music production and listening. It created a culture where the record-buying public prided themselves on their hi-fi systems and searched out the records that would best show them off.

Record producers, for their part, took advantage of the better fidelity to create a genre that sounded cleaner, crisper, fresher, and more playful than in the past. This lead to a burst of creativity that still makes for exciting listening today.

But it doesn’t stop there. Starting in the 1990s, there was something called The Lounge Revival, where a new generation of musicians rediscovered this classic hi-fi music. They started to record their own versions of the standards as well as to create their own vintage-influenced music, which continues to today.