Don Tiki
The Honolulu collective led by Lloyd Kandell and Kit Ebersbach that carried the Shell Bar lineage forward into the revival. A ten-piece-plus ensemble of Hawaiʻi’s working musicians—the modern Exotica band with the most direct claim on cultural continuity with the canonical era.
Don Tiki is the revival band that brought Exotica home to Hawaiʻi. The collective is the creation of Lloyd Kandell—performing as Fluid Floyd—and Kit Ebersbach, the keyboardist and arranger who works under the alias Perry Coma and carries decades of Honolulu-scene credentials. The two assembled Don Tiki in the mid-1990s as a way to revive the genre in the place it actually came from, and debuted in 1997 with The Forbidden Sounds of Don Tiki. The debut featured Martin Denny himself in one of his final recordings—a literal handoff from the man who codified the small-combo Exotica sound at the Shell Bar to the band that would extend it into the next century.
The ensemble is the defining feature. Where Combustible Edison was a six-piece studio band and Tipsy was a two-person production duo, Don Tiki fields ten to twelve players at full strength: multiple percussionists, vibraphone, keys, guitar, bass, woodwinds, and a rotating cast of vocalists. The band draws on Hawaiʻi’s deepest professional bench—players whose résumés run from jazz fusion to world beat to the Honolulu Symphony to the Waikīkī showroom circuit. That circuit traces direct personnel and venue lineage back through the post-Denny, post-Lyman Honolulu scene to the canonical Shell Bar era. The continuity isn’t mythology; it’s documented in working musicians’ biographies.
The arrangements lean into that scale. Where Exotica (1957) had been a four-piece working-bar combo, Don Tiki builds full-ensemble productions—layered percussion lines, vibe-and-marimba textures, woodwind soloists, vocal features—closer to Les Baxter’s orchestral register than to Denny’s small-combo intimacy, but threaded with slack-key voicings, hula percussion patterns, and occasional Hawaiian-language vocals that no mainland record of the 1950s could access. The catalog has grown steadily since the debut: Skinny Dip with Don Tiki (2001), the remix collection Adulterated (2004), South of the Boudoir (2009), and the seasonal Hot Lava Holiday Songs (2012).
Start here
The Forbidden Sounds of Don Tiki (1997) is the founding document and the right entry point—the Denny features alone make it essential, and the large-ensemble sound is fully formed from the first record. From there, Skinny Dip with Don Tiki (2001) extends the original-composition side of the project most rewardingly.
Why they matter
Don Tiki holds the strongest claim to cultural continuity with the canonical era of any band in the revival. The Hawaiʻi-based personnel, the explicit Shell Bar lineage, the Denny handoff on the debut, and the contemporary Native Hawaiian vocal contributions place the project inside actual Hawaiian music-making rather than recovering the genre from outside it. For a listener building a serious revival shelf, Don Tiki is the band that most directly extends the genre’s real Hawaiian roots—and the one that complicates, in the most productive way, the imagined-Polynesia tension that runs through everything Exotica touches.