Do they still have elevator music in elevators?

Do they still have elevator music in elevators? I live in a provincial town. In my workplace there are few lifts (which is what we call elevators in Australia) and anyway I usually take the stairs. But when I do go to the big smoke and catch a lift in an office tower, there is no music. Silence, and the faint hum of (hopefully reliable) machinery, reigns.

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This is a welcome change. When you caught a lift, not so long ago, they would inflict on the passengers what, even in Australia, was called “elevator music”. This is the sort of thing I mean.

That was Wout Steenhuis and Peter Schilperoort with their take on Procal Harem’s “Whiter Shade of Pale”.

Now, I mean absolutely no offense here. On Planet Vinyl we believe that it is always a good thing that people make music, and if they can get paid for it, so much the better. Wout and Peter were both Dutch musicians, jazz instrumentalists. Making a living from jazz in post-war Holland cannot have been easy, and if recording this sort of thing helped pay the bills, I have no problem with that. The Planet Vinyl rule is to just listen, with an open mind. But you only have to do it once. And I honestly don’t want to hear this track again.

But there is elevator music, and elevator music.

The track from Steenhuis and Schilperoort comes from one of the samplers which many labels produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, hoping to persuade listeners to upgrade to stereo. Stereo Galaxy, it was modestly titled, and promised “A New World of Quality Sound”. Fitting the space theme, the opening track is a version of “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, the brass-and-kettle-drum fiesta by Richard Strauss, which had been adopted as the theme to the movie 2001 – A Space Odyssey. But the record quickly settles down – well, into elevator music. Tightly-played, over-sweet arrangements of well-known tunes.

But while riding the Stereo Galaxy elevator, one track stood out for me. Elevator music, yes, but … There was “a certain something”. Faint praise given the competition, but still. It stood out. There was something there.

And so I have discovered the Hawaiian music of Basil Henriques. If that does not sound a particularly Hawaiian name, you are onto something – Baz did not hail from Hawaii. He was an Englishman, who fell in love with the Hawaiian pedal steel guitar as a teenager. Henriques became small-big, playing regularly with a group called the Waikiki Islanders (none of whom came from Waikiki) at a nightclub in Birmingham, which was called (not making this up) Kastaways. Band photographs of the Waikiki Islanders show them, shivering and white, in kitsch Hawaiian outfits.

But music is the universal language. It crosses cultures and times. And the spirit of music will out.

Basil, the pale lad from Birmingham, could play, really play, the Hawaiian pedal steel guitar. This guitar is the uilleann pipes of string instruments – demanding to the point of insanity. Henriques mastered it, and went on to teach and inspire others, such that he was formally nominated for inclusion in the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame, a most unusual thing for someone not from Hawaii. He has not yet been included, but that serious steel peddlers think he deserves to be considered in the company of Sol Hoʻopiʻi is high praise indeed.

I doubt that this track is Henriques’ best work – its is flattened out to fit into the elevator – but there is musicianship there that shines. If I was to be stuck in a lift, this is the music I would like to listen to.