Easy listening music is a style of popular music and radio format that emerged in the mid-20th century, evolving out of swing and big band music, and related to Beautiful music and Light music. Easy listening music features simple, catchy melodies, soft, laid-back songs and occasionally rhythms suitable for couples dancing. The genre includes both instrumental forms (often played on light of tone instruments such as the Hammond Organ, "lush strings", or Ukulele); and vocal forms featuring pop singers, such as Barbra Streisand, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Jack Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Eydie Gorme, Barry Manilow, Harry Connick Jr., Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, Bing Crosby, Tom Jones and Mel Tormé.
The easy listening radio format has been generally but not completely superseded by the "Lite AC" form of Adult contemporary music radio. Beautiful music is a subset of easy listening music, since, as a radio format, it had rigid standards for instrumentation (e.g., few or no saxophones) and restrictions on how many vocal pieces could be played in an hour. It is sometimes called Nostalgia music. Often, songs were re-arranged instrumental "cover" versions of popular songs of the 1960s and 1970s custom-produced for the radio format during its peak in popularity.
There's a certain comfort in music that sounds familiar even if you've never heard it before. In the mid-’40s, WWII soldiers returned from the South Pacific with a taste for the music they’d been exposed to there, as reflected in the sunny, humid vibrations of artists like Martin Denny. Jazz musicians like saxophonist Stan Getz gorgeously mixed João Gilberto's Brazilian bossa nova with California cool. And Herb Alpert topped '60s pop charts as the (one-man) Tijuana Brass. Composers like Nino Rota (Federico Fellini's longtime provider of fabulous filmic festivity) and Argentine-American Lalo Schifrin (known for his catchy action scores) can both be found sipping Mai Tais under easy listening's big tent. Usually instrumental, the genre embraces the accordion-and-guitar minimalism of '40s nightclub veterans The Three Suns as much as it does Percy Faith's sumptuous orchestral arrangements, which repurposed pop hits as golden mood music.
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