Teen Drums

AMG Review of Teen Drums

Fred Beldin
All Music Guide

A follow-up to the popular Skins! Bongo Party with Les Baxter LP of 1957, Les Baxter's Teen Drums returns the easy listening maestro to pure beat territory, and the results are as wholesome as the squeaky-clean youngsters grinning on the album cover. Producer/arranger/marimbist Baxter collected a group of session percussionists schooled in various foreign rhythms (Afro-Cuban, Puerto Rican, Brazilian) and steered them through 11 improvised selections. Congas, bongos, tom toms, and timbales are employed, surrounded by the occasional saxophone, piano, or guitar to rein in any stray solo excursions. "Ting Ting Ting" and "Brazil Nuts" start the album off with appropriately busy rhythms, but the furor fades and Teen Drums delivers skeletal arrangements and tightly restrained beats without aggression or abstraction, fading easily into the background as Baxter probably intended. The jazzy "I Dig" swings the hardest, "Barbarian" shoots for (and misses) some Link Wray-style guitar rumble, and "Boombada" rewrites the "Peter Gunn Theme" for an imaginary film noir soundtrack. Les Baxter's Teen Drums is well-behaved exotica, a pleasant approximation of romantic rhythms for the average space-age bachelor's cocktail party.