Taboo
Arthur Lyman’s 1958 Hi-Fi Records debut. Recorded live inside the geodesic Kaiser Aluminum Dome on Waikīkī—two seconds of natural reverb, two omnidirectional microphones, no overdubs. The album sold over two million copies and opened a second front of Exotica that ran parallel to Denny’s combo pop for the rest of the genre’s golden era.
Taboo is the album that made the Kaiser Aluminum Dome part of Exotica’s recording history. Arthur Lyman had left Martin Denny’s Shell Bar combo in 1957 to lead his own group, signed with the small Hi-Fi Records label in Los Angeles, and insisted on recording inside the geodesic aluminum-paneled dome that Henry J. Kaiser had built on Waikīkī as an architectural demonstration project. The dome had nearly two seconds of natural reverb. Engineer Don McDiarmid Jr. set up two omnidirectional microphones in the center of the floor, the four-piece combo set up around them, and they played the album live, late at night, when the building was empty.
The album sounds like nothing else in the Exotica catalog. Where Denny’s Exotica placed the combo close to studio microphones in a normal recording space, Lyman’s Taboo lets the room do the work. Percussion hangs in the air for a full two seconds before decaying. Vibraphones bloom and fade through the reverb. Bass notes ring through the dome and into the percussion passages of the next section. There’s no studio compression, no close miking, no overdubs. The recording is, structurally, an architectural document—the sound the Kaiser Aluminum Dome made when four musicians played inside it.
The combo was tight: Lyman on vibraphone and marimba, Alan Soares on piano and keyboards, John Kramer on bass (the same Kramer who had played with Denny), and Harold Chang on percussion. The arrangements are looser than Denny’s—fewer hooks, longer instrumental passages, more space between the lines. Taboo itself opens the album with a slow vibraphone melody over conga and birdcall, building over four-plus minutes. Bwana A is a percussion showcase that runs nearly seven minutes (long for 1958). China Clipper and Sim Sim cover Latin-American and quasi-Asian territory in the broader Exotica imagined-elsewhere idiom.
Commercially, Taboo outperformed nearly everyone’s expectations. It sold over two million copies (the often-cited figure; the exact RIAA documentation is harder to verify), making it one of the best-selling instrumental albums of the late 1950s. The success made Lyman an immediate competitor to Denny and established that two Exotica sounds could coexist in the market: Denny’s combo-pop tight arrangements at Liberty, and Lyman’s Kaiser Dome reverb at Hi-Fi.
The Kaiser Aluminum Dome itself was demolished in 1999 to make room for hotel expansion. The recordings Lyman made inside it between 1958 and the mid-1960s—Taboo, Hawaiian Sunset, Bahia, Yellow Bird, several others—are now historical documents of a sound a particular building made. No subsequent recording space has replicated the specific acoustic.
Start here: Taboo for the canonical opener. Bwana A for the deepest percussion work. China Clipper for the textural register. The album is short enough (under 35 minutes) that listening end-to-end is the right move.
Why it matters: Taboo opened a second strand of Exotica that ran parallel to Denny’s combo pop for the rest of the genre’s golden era. The two sounds—Denny’s tight Shell Bar arrangements at Liberty, Lyman’s Kaiser Dome reverb at Hi-Fi—defined the genre’s commercial heart from 1957 through the mid-1960s. Taboo is the founding document of the Lyman side of that two-strand dynamic.
Related Forbidden Altar content: Arthur Lyman, Martin Denny. The Kaiser Aluminum Dome—historical architecture, no current Forbidden Altar entry but a candidate for a future History essay.