…by the Tikiyaki Orchestra is now on YouTube via The Great White Shank’s channel for your listening enjoyment. I’ve been waiting for someone to upload a video of the song for awhile now, but as the saying goes, you want something done right you just have to do it yourself. So I did.

Aloha, Baby! is just a great track, full of fun and effervesence. I challenge anyone who might be in a bad mood or frame of mind to listen to it and not come away smiling. The track itself has some great layers musically, bouncing out of the starting gate with happy vibraphone, drums, bass and a little guitar emphasizing the backbeat. A Hawaiian steel guitar introduces the next section where it takes the lead backed by a swing-beat rhythm of riding cymbal and walking bass, surf guitar adding some tasty licks – I can’t help but think my old Top Priority buds would have loved that! For the second verse, the vibraphone is backed by a cheesy-sounding organ (just perfect) with clipped guitar chords emphasized. In the second “chorus”, surf guitar and Hawaiian steel share the lead, and if you listen carefully you’ll hear some very cool “clip clop” percussion accenting the swing beat. The final verse introduces a key change, but the instrumentation is the same as the first verse, although at times I think I can hear that organ lurking deep in the background. Rather than enter the chorus a third time, the song instead heads into a happy close with walking bass and cymbal again riding the tempo to an abbreviated end, which is the only disappointment in the song. Me, I would have finished with a crashing gong or cymbal just to emphasize the exotic joy this song conveys.

If you want to know where The Great White Shank’s musical heart is these days, it’s somewhere in between tracks like The Sandals’ Tradewinds, Laika and the Cosmonauts’ “Fadeaway”, Cachao’s “Guajira Clasica”, Jimmy Buffett’s “Floridays”, and Aloha, Baby! I dunno, there’s something about the vibe and musicianship these songs have that just seem to fit the way I want to live my life, at least as far as music is concerned.