Easy Listening Music from the 50s, 60s and 70s, Lounge and Elevator Music

*hear (sp)

Sinatra wasn’t elevator music.

No.

R2 Yes, he was. "Strangers in the Night" was an elevator classic in the 70s.

A web show about old technical stuff called Techmoan did an ep about the Seeberg Background Music that was designed for offices and stores and factories and was fascinated. It's one of those ubiquitous things you never think about.

YouTube has a bunch of the records uploaded and they're fun to hear.

Does Muzak still exist? It seems like most businesses are using satellite or streaming services these days.

I watch the 1960s WPIX Yule Log every Christmas. I like the corniness of the Mitch Miller Singers

R5 That's interesting. Thanks for the link.

My dad had some Percy Faith and 101 Strings albums. There was actually one Ray Coniff 8-track he played in the car that was listenable - they others gave me headaches.

My all time favorite is this track which is played as background music in dozens of films from the 70s.

I grew up working in a German restaurant and the Muzak was all strings -- mostly waltzes. I really liked it because let's face it, how often did a kid hear waltzes in the 60s? Later, there was an accordionist. Didn't like that music at all.

I think there's a difference between 101 Strings and Frank Sinatra.

I love listening to what's referred to as the Great American Songbook being sung by singers like Sinatra, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat Cole, etc, but that cascading strings shit from Mantovani makes me want to jab an ice pick in my ears

In New Orleans, there was an FM radio station, maybe called BYU stereo..but pronounced Bayou Stereo that played only Muzak. In the 70s, my grandmother would pipe that music in her house in every room. She said Music Soothes the Savage Beast.

I really dont miss that radio station and its Muzak

Some Seeberg music from 1972

I cannot stand polka, but the strings music is nice. Most of what is considered easy listening today and played in supermarkets are usually slow songs from 80s musicians. I hear Cyndi Lauper's "Time after Time" quite often.

Muzak compilation

Somebody posted a song here on a similar thread that was the quintessential elevator music song by Wes Montgomery. Can somebody find that song, please?

Don't forget us!

A one-a anna two-a!

There was a great supermarket I used to go to that closed about 2 years ago. They would play the strangest music for a supermarket, like the entire Surrealistic Pillow album. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, vanilla Fudge, Mountain, Spirit. One of the reason why I loved it was because they never rearranged the products - you could walk in, grab something and then pay for it because there was no o e else in there. Which is another reason why I loved it and - obviously - the reason why it closed.

I love The Carpenters. RIP Karen.

........

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My dad had a large collection of these albums which he would often play when my parents would have friends over for drinks. I've always loved the cover art.

R10 sounds like background music from a cheap porn flick.

R14 sounds like the soundtrack to a Drivers Ed film.

Gee thanks, R23. Love is Blue has some of the stupidest lyrics ever, and now it's an earworm.

I heard this at the supermarket last week. Caught a bunch of old people absently singing along.

I thought this was brilliant in post-election 2012.

Singers like Frank Sinatra and Dinah Washington were also played on easy listening stations. Not the same as 101 Strings, but they were played for relaxation. Frank might be considered more "pop vocals."

I agree with R12.

R12 It is possible to have both

I wouldn't put Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett in the same category with the others.

[quote] I wouldn't put Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett in the same category with the others.

But they are considered "easy listening" and always find them filed with the instrumentals at the used record shops.

The Living Strings Orchestra!

As I type I am listening to "Easy Listening" Music Choice channel on Comcast cable. I always have it on when I am reading the paper or surfing the web. It is all instrumentals, no vocals whatsoever. I love it. It's soothing and certain melodies really transport me to a long time ago.

The king of space-age bachelor pad music, Esquivel

In the early 70s before we had cable tv here in the Philadelphia suburbs, we would vacation at Jersey shore motels and they were my first exposure to cable tv. Channel 2 was a constant series of billboard-style ads for local businesses and also had a scroll at the bottom showing weather forecasts and tidal information; it was accompanied by an easy listening soundtrack and there was something so mesmerizing and soothing about it. Of course since I loved vacation at the shore this may be why easy listening music makes me warm and happy.

I absolutely love this music. It is sad that the Beautiful Music genre has almost died. Fortunately there are still a couple of radio stations that play it. I listen to a station KNCT. It broadcasts from somewhere in Texas, but I can play it with Alexa / Tunein Radio.

Although I'm not sure this is the best arrangement, I've always found "The Lamp is Low" (based on a Ravel pavanne) to be quite beautiful.

R37 Funny you should mention that because when UHF TV stations would have "technical difficulties" they would play music over the image below. To this day I can still remember the tune that would often play. I have no idea what it is or where it is from, but I still remember it from when I was a kid.

Perez Prado

This is the type of tune that would often play in Woolworth's and T G & Y

There were a lot of rock and rock-adjacent instrumentals that were hits in the '50s through at least the '70s, if not later. Anything by Duane Eddy or Herb Alpert/TJB. And "Telstar," "Classical Gas," "Theme From S.W.A.T.," "The Happy Organ," "Pipeline," "More," et. al.

But that genre seems to have all but disappeared.

Summer Samba

Quiet Village

Walter Wanderley collaboration with the fabulous Astrud Gilberto

Don't forget 5 Neat Guys; Including 'Who Made the Egg Salad Sandwiches', 'Let's Have a Party in My Rec Room', 'Patsy Has the Largest Breasts in Town', 'She Does It', 'I'm the Goof in the Classroom', 'Don't Step on my Clip on Tie'.

Herb Alpert Rise.

R46 I love that.

Herb Alpert Last Tango

One of the very best.

I love Martin Denny and Les Baxter and all that Exotica stuff. In fact I recently had to admit that my easy listening tendency wasnt "ironic". I genuinely like a lot of it. The cochlea want what the cochlea want.

Another beauty. They just don't make 'em like this anymore.

101 Strings had a few flashes of brilliance like this record and they even dabbled in a few sitar rock pieces.

The best supermarket music is the last scene from the original Stepford Wives

[quote]I absolutely love this music. It is sad that the Beautiful Music genre has almost died. Fortunately there are still a couple of radio stations that play it. I listen to a station KNCT. It broadcasts from somewhere in Texas, but I can play it with Alexa / Tunein Radio.

Try KABL on TuneIn. It's a station with announcers, gentle foghorns and cable car sounds that brilliantly recreates a 1960s Beautiful Music station out of San Francisco.

[quote]It was the merry month of May 1959 when the soothing sounds of KABL Music first echoed throughout the Bay Area. KABL, named for San Francisco's cable cars, was a bold departure from other radio stations of that era. KABL serenaded San Francisco with lush, beautiful music, very few commercials, and rich-voiced announcers who wooed the Bay Area with poetic paeans. This gentle KABL sound soon swept the area.

The Ultra Lounge series CDs are the best lounge music that I've come across. The 17 track Ultra-Lounge: Tiki Sampler is the best one to start with. Below is A Taste Of Hoiney by the Jackie Gleason band.

Thanks R56 that brought back memories of Sunday drives in our 1965 Pontiac Catalina.

Even as a little gayling who would listen to KYA with my friends, I found KABL to be oddly comforting, even as I would outwardly complain about having to listen to it on the way home from Sunday dinner at the Nut Tree or Stickney's Hick'ry House. But then, I'd borrow Broadway albums from the library so I guess I was destined for that kind of music all along.

When my parents got a new car with FM stereo, we'd listed to KABL-FM, which actually sounded pretty amazing

More great stuff.

There's some vintage Muzak on Youtube. If you know your musicians, haunt record shops and yard sales, thrift shops and you will find it.

Channel 69 on Serius radio has a version of muzak. They call it Easy Listening.

I miss Ferrante and Teicher! Bossa Nova!

The quintessential easy listening song:

R6, No it doesn't. The last Chairman/CEO left his wife for a (much, much, much younger) sales associate with the company. Poof!

Jackie Gleason

In Metro New York in the mid-50s, WPAT 93 AM and FM was the first station in the country to play half-hour segments of uninterrupted music. They would rotate male vocal, female vocal. instrumentals and groups. No vocals before 9AM. A program guide was mailed monthly for "Gaslight Review," listing every selection heard between 7:00 and 11:00PM weeknights.

I remember WPAT in the 1970s and 1980s. Danny Stiles played mostly big band music but also some lounge and easy listening.

Muzak had a good deal going. While they were charging businesses to receive their service on special radios, anyone with an FM radio tuned to WBFM 101.9 could get the same music free. Today 101.9 is WFAN All-Sports.

I grew up listening to KABL radio and still appreciate easy listening music (on the down low because it's so unhip). But I like it. I think "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" by Perez Prado is the sexiest song ever written. That trumpet solo by Billy Regis gets me every time.

Also on the down low, I look forward to Lawrence Welk reruns on PBS every Saturday. The arrangements are corny as hell and I dislike the cookie-cutter young vocalists he hired after the Lennons left, but those cats in the band could really play. Many of them were veterans of 1940s big bands.

Here's another beaut from the 70s.

The funny thing about Jackie Gleason's series is that people didn't think he would make any money doing it, but they were wrong.

R65, After more than 50 years in radio, Danny Stiles "The Vicar of Vinyl" was on WNYC-FM Saturday nights until his death in 2011. His archived shows aired until 2014.

Bob Crewe eventually came out before he passed on.

This was a hit in 1957. We still have the 45 of it.

This is the last instrumental I remember being played on the radio before new age music became popular.

R71 LOL. Looks like he was already watching the boys there.

white bird

I worked in a grocery store. It was satellite. They would play Dan Fogelberg, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, as well as current adult contemporary. I liked Joni Mitchells Free Man in Paris. It was very soothing.

Has any one of us been as ecstatically happy as the woman on the LP cover of MALLET MISCHIEF?

I've been getting into some stuff that is probably easy listening as you define it.

I've picked up a few Herb Alpert and Sergio Mendes albums, though most of them are leading into the 70s stuff where it evolved away from straight easy listening to more disco-influenced. Same with Ramsey Lewis, which is more jazz, but still has the same idea (covering popular songs).

I also enjoy Kenny Rankin, Jackie and Roy......probably very jazz to most people but I still consider them more easy listening.

[quote] R10 sounds like background music from a cheap porn flick.

No, not like this...

A staple of all those K-Tel collections they used to advertise on TV.

r58 You could be me! I was a KYA guy, too (never KFRC!), and sometimes KEWB (Channel 91). We had a Pontiac StarChief ('64). I remember the Nut Tree very well, and Stickney's (although I don't think we ever went there.)

Jack Jones

We need some Bacharach up in this bitch!

Another last gasp of 'beautiful music' on the pop charts: Mocedades and "Eres tu."

R79 Your post made me laugh. Years ago I was traveling with a youth group - we stayed in a hotel and of course we were all curious so we checked out the adult TV channels.

I remember this hysterical song playing on the hotel TV pay per view as a promo.

This one is real sensual and gets me moist.

I call it, Music to watch tropical fish swim by.

Utterly mindless background music.

Okay R63, you've opened a can of worms.

As a precocious child, I loved going through the record cabinets of my parents' friends and the Jackie Gleason albums fascinated me.

The one you posted is pretty straightforward. The woman is melancholy over a lost love, so she's sitting alone at the bar, all dressed up with no place to go, having a drink, despondent over the love that got away. Stood up by her married paramour, perhaps? Did they have a fight and he stormed out, leaving her to ruminate over what went wrong? Is she a high-class call girl?

But the one that continues to puzzle me is 'Jackie Gleason Music For Lovers Only'. Two glasses of champagne, the one closest to the woman is noticeably more empty. Is her date deliberately trying to get her drunk? Two freshly lit cigarettes, one with lipstick, one where the tip is obscured, but presumably belonging to the man who owns the nearby hat. Did they light their cigarettes only to abandon them for a quick trip around the dance floor?

One pair of gloves and one fancy evening bag suggests the couple is high-class, out for an evening in a swanky nightclub. But look, a key is on the table. Is it her apartment key? Not a hotel key, there is no fob, common in those days. Her car key, perhaps? Is she suggesting to him that she's had a bit too much to drink and he'd better drive her home, and does that suggestion come with an implicit invitation to spend the night?

Or are they already at her apartment? His hat is on the table, where in a nightclub it would've been left at the coat check. Has he chivalrously returned the key, poured their drinks, and lit their cigarettes, only to leave them abandoned for a steamy embrace, just out of camera range? Are they fucking on the floor?

After all, the album is titles 'For Lovers Only'

My mom had KOAX FM playing nonstop on our stereo when I was a kid. KOAX was the ‘Beautiful Music’ radio station in Dallas.

For a lot of the stations with this format the content was custom produced which is why you can’t find recordings of it— a shame because I’d love to hear it again.

Some of this music was better than the rest.

Some of you people referencing music with vocals are on the wrong thread. Easy listening/muzak does not have vocals!

R91 That looks like a great compilation. I may have to order one.

The woman in R77's album cover looks like she's trying to hang herself.

Oh, and this is for R81. I remember KEWB. My cousin and I used to go into adjoining public restroom stalls, sing their "Sound of the City" jingle, then flush.

R94's mention of jingles reminded me of....

[quote] I remember KEWB. My cousin and I used to go into adjoining public restroom stalls, sing their "Sound of the City" jingle, then flush.

Wasn't "The Sound of the City" from KSFO?

When I worked at a Beautiful Music station we had every 101 Strings album. . One of the selections had four titles on different LPs. It was long enough that I could go to the bathroom without rushing and be back in time to cue the next record.

R96 Can you sing along?

The Music Choice channels on Cable have an Easy Listening channel and I find it very nice when I'm home and just want to read or putter around the apartment. They do play the Percy Faith/Mantovani type stuff but mostly "artists" who play that sort of lilting stringy background stuff. Often I hear tunes I remember from when I was a kid in the 60s/70s. For instance right now it's playing I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face by someone named Cyril Ornadel. When I visit my folks sometimes they have it on because it's so soothing. If I want Sinatra and company I seek out that channel Singers and Swing but that's not background music to me. That's the best music ever...The American Songbook and I can't refrain from singing. R7, I remember watching Mitch Miller as a kid and we even have (still have) one of the Sing Along with Mitch LPs. I used to wait for Leslie Uggams to show up.

r98 30 years ago --maybe. My parents actually had the record of that, which I think came with some other stuff. I probably still have it somewhere.

This was the record.

Back in the early 70s when my mom's eccentric friend, Joan would come to visit she would get drunk and tango to Ray Conniff's Midnight Lace Part 2 (which begins at the 2:17 mark). She looked a bit like Lana from Three's Company, wore leopard pattern mini skirts and had her hair styled like Priscilla Presley.

We hated it then, but any hold out still playing SOFT and rather classy muzak after 2000, created a nostalgic, warm feeling. Much better than the HIDEOUS GAP PLAYLISTS for example, or shitty shitty shitty Xmas classics for 2 or 3 months.

R89,my parents had that album. The cover intrigued me, too.

Ok, two favorites:

A Walk in the Black Forest (Horst Jankowski)

Stranger on the Shore (Acker Bilk)

Anyone remember WAYE in Baltimore? They were the local beautiful music station and broadcast from atop a modern high-rise apartment building near the Md Institute of Art. Very sophisticated in this 10 year old's eyes.

#1 in 1962:

This thread caught my eye because, evidently, OP was educated before the question mark was invented.

What replaced Easy Listening? Music That Is Hard To Listen To?

When easy listening went out of fashion as a radio format it was replaced by adult contemporary and ‘smooth jazz’.

R96, you're correct. "Sound of the City" was KSFO's jingle. R98, the way I remember the jingle, it was more upbeat and shorter than the YouTube clip. It was just "Sound ...of.... the Cityyyyy" without the long introduction. Trust me, you don't want to hear me try to sing it.

R56 thanks for the recommendation of KABL. I listened to it last night and it is wonderful.

R102 She sounds like a hoot.

R112 She really was. She had three daughters, bought each of them vibrators when they turned 18 and told them all to go out and have sex.

My dad loved easy listening music.

Henry Mancini was great. This song is in the soundtrack of The Big Lebowski and Sexy Beast.

More Herb Alpert lounge music from the 80s.

Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 - The Fool On The Hill (1968) As a classically trained musician, Sergio Mendes has always been a guilty obsession from the first moment I heard him . . . when I saw him at the Circle Star in San Carlos, my world was changed forever; the most recent live performance I enjoyed was a free performance at the Glendale Galleria (!) on 4 August 2011; really really hot! I don't really think he qualifies as "easy listening", but since he was mentioned upthread I thought I'd throw this out there. Vocals by Karen Philipp & Lani Hall! Cast this to your big screen!

I got a copy of this 1972 Qantas in-flight playlist years ago and it's a trip to listen to it on iTunes while flying.

SERGIO MENDES & BRASIL 66 : GOING OUT OF MY HEAD (((STEREO))) At the Hollywood Palace!; Lani Hall & Janice Hansen!

[quote]What replaced Easy Listening? Music That Is Hard To Listen To?

Yes. Definitely.

Oh my gosh, look at her butt/Oh my gosh, look at her butt/Oh my gosh, look at her butt/(Look at her butt)/Look at, look at, look at/Look, at her butt/Yeah, he love this fat ass, hahaha!

Yeah! This one is for my bitches with a fat ass in the fucking club/I said, where my fat ass big bitches in the club?/Fuck the skinny bitches! Fuck the skinny bitches in the club!/I wanna see all the big fat ass bitches in the muthafuckin' club/Fuck you if you skinny bitches, what?! Kyuh/Haha, haha/I got a big fat ass (ass, ass, ass)/Come on!

I play my old Sergio Mendes Greatest Hits cd in the car all the time and the music sounds as fresh as when I first listed in the late 60s. Timeless.

Classic.

I know, R119, R121, R122 - it's beautiful music. I love them, too.

I love how Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66 Scarborogh Fair was used for the opening of Heavy Traffic.

[quote] What replaced Easy Listening?

Smooth jazz

Dick Hyman

I like it better than hip hop.

[quote] Smooth jazz

There was an early part of "smooth jazz" that I liked some of......earlier Bob James, singers like Michael Franks, etc.

When it all became Very Kenny G, though, I was not on board.

My grandmother had almost all of Roger William's albums I would go to her house and put them on the HiFi and listen to them all day.

Yes. My mother kept WEZN on the hifi since we didn’t have a TV for many years. I still remember all the lyrics.

She also liked the folkish music: Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, the Mamas and the Papas, Melanie, Joni Mitchell.

I enjoy a lot of this music. It's sort of like comfort food, I guess.

Some of the nicest recordings came from James Last before he became all modern and stuff with his Nonstop Dancing series. Here is "A Summer Place" from 1966.

R128 I loved Bob James. Especially Nautilus. This was sampled in a lot of early rap songs. I'm not sure if any of it would be catagorized as smooth jazz. I thought of it more as fusion/electronic jazz. I was introduced to a lot of it on the LA radio station KKGO back in 1980. They'd play Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Jean Luc Ponty, David Sanborn, Pat Metheny. Then came The Wave which I'm pretty sure is the station that gave us Kenny G.

Yeah, R132, that's kind of what I am checking out now. Have a few Bob James LPs including One.

"Chill" was a form of easy listening in the 90's. I've always enjoyed making passionate love to bands like Air and Nightmares on Wax.

I live and grew up in New York - land of 10 million elevators - and I've never heard Muzak in any of them. Up until recently, it wasn't in supermarkets either. Whatever kind of music - I hate hearing it every fucking place I go now, from supermarkets to stores and restaurants.

WHY must there be music in every fucking place???

What passes for easy listening today is really adult contemporary, soft rock oldies from the seventies, eighties and nineties.

Now here is a youtube channel that truly understands the glamor of lounge music.

Y un otro.

"I love Noel Coward "Live At Las Vegas.

This thread was made for me!! The beautiful music format is sadly all but dead. Even the legendary KWXY out of Palm Springs (Cathedral City) is gone from the dial, but still on the net. The format was a mix of mostly instrumentals, but with a generous sprinkling of easy listening vocals. Pure fun! Sirius Escape (Ch 69) is a pretty decent place to hear it.

A little cheesy but in the earthy 70's plant music was a genre and this isn't half bad.

R141 I remember checking that record out from the library.

I like a lot of this music. Wes Montgomery's final albums (for CTI) are often derided by serious Jazz heads but I like 'em. Even the design on the old CTI albums was great.

And like R128 I can sorta get with some Michael Franks. But not Kenny G.

Wes doing a song from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

One I remember from those stations.

R137! I LOVE IT!!!!! I was was rolling with laughter over the campiness of that video. I love the music; I want to run out and get a Bose sound system and play it all through the house.

Thanks for brightening my day.

R4, Your point? One can hear the Beatles in the grocery store today. The distinction is what was the purpose, the intent, the genre of the music?

So no; Sinatra was NOT "elevator music." And moreover, neither was Herb Alpert and the TJB.

The Strings of Mantovani or the sounds of the Ray Conniff Singers? Yes.

"Cross Over The Bridge" from 1954 by Patti Page is on the March 1994 GAP In-Store Playlist!

I went to an all male burlesque show where the men would strip completely nude. One of the dancers performed to this...

Girl in blue dress.

Nelson Riddle with Burt Ward spoken word

Jones College Radio specializes in mid-20th century easy listening or "beautiful music" as is promoted. Jones College is becoming the Riverton Tower Senior Center, Inc. a 501(c)3 Florida corporation not for profit. It building in Jacksonville florida is now a 62 plus independent senior living community so I expect/hope the relaxing music continues. You can stream the music from the page available from the Web Site Link.

As a little boy I loved the Mitch Miller Show. I always watched with my father which it turned out was one of the few things we would ever do together.

Flash forward more than twenty years later and I'm working at Tower and who comes up to ask me a question but the man Mitch looking not much different from what I remembered.

I was shocked not only that this was someone from a past so long ago he might as well have been in a vivid dream always hidden away but I thought he had been dead since the show had ended because I never saw him again.

When I got over the shock I wanted to ask him about George Gershwin who I had read had been a friend of his but all he wanted to know was how his new recording was doing. I would never have imagined there was one.

There are some really great bands making this style of music. Check out Swing Out Sister (yes, the same band of 80's "Breakout" fame).

A favorite record is Ray Conniff and his singers doing songs from The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins made about the time they all had become hit films.

Favorites are The Sound of Music and Climb Every Mountain done in doo wop style. They never fail to make me laugh and I always wondered why some male group doo wop singers never picked up the arrangements. They would have been a lot of fun.

Included are Dear Heart and the very annoying Pass Me By.

ROFL R154! "Pass Me By" is torture! I grew up listening to Ray Coniff and that song was just appallingly bad.

R152, that's a great story. I was a fellow Mitch fan as a kid (didn't his show come on Friday nights?) and like you it was one of the few things my dad and I enjoyed together.

I've read more than once that Mitch was a grade A prick in real life. Kinda sad when you think of the happiness he brought to so many.

Work that skirt

Coniff's Need A Little Christmas

Henry Mancini - Mr. Lucky

I used to listen to a Christian radio station at a place I worked at as it was always just music, never songs with lyrics, so it wasn't at all distracting. And some strange choices, like instrumental versions of Talking Heads songs. They also used to have a morning quiz and one time, after they asked the question twice because no one had gotten the answer, I rang in and won! My prize turned up a week later - a Bible.

Is downtempo the Muzak of today?

I was pretty indifferent to Frank Sinatra until I heard this song. It was written by Johnny Mercer.

"The Summer Wind"

Love "Summer Wind," just so evocative.

YouTube has tons of low key jazz -- "Morning Coffee Jazz," "Jazz for Late Night," etc. -- I think of it as modern day Muzak.

Okay, this isn't 50s, 60s, 70s lounge music. It's Steve and Eydie interpreting Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" in 1997.

That was truly bizarre, R164! I always loved Steve & Eydie; it seems like they were game for anything.

R53 I love that song too. I still play it often. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who still remembers that song.

Chi Mai by the great Ennio Morricone gets heavy rotation on easy listening stations.

Henry Mancini - Two for the Road

This: