By the late 1950s the one solid wall of a glass-walled living room usually had a record player against it. What it played was not always serious. Next to the jazz there were records full of bird calls, bongos and vibraphone, with the word stereo across the top of the sleeve.

This is a guide to that music, to the quieter jazz that sat beside it on the shelf, and to the machines built to play both.

How the hi-fi got into the house

Columbia Records unveiled the long-playing record at the Waldorf Astoria in New York on June 18, 1948, according to the Library of Congress. It turned at 33 1/3 revolutions a minute and held about 23 minutes a side. RCA Victor answered in 1949 with the seven-inch 45. Stereo records went on sale in 1958.

The equipment became a hobby and then a fashion. Life magazine was writing about a hi-fi bandwagon in 1953, and Time followed in 1955.

Exotica

The style began in a Hollywood studio. Les Baxter's album Ritual of the Savage came out on Capitol in 1951, and one of its pieces was called Quiet Village. The year before, Baxter had arranged and conducted Voice of the Xtabay for the Peruvian singer Yma Sumac, also on Capitol.

It became a craze in Honolulu. The pianist Martin Denny was playing the Shell Bar at Henry J. Kaiser's Hawaiian Village from 1956, with Arthur Lyman on vibraphone and Augie Colon on percussion. As Denny told it, bullfrogs in a pond beside the bandstand began croaking during a number, the band answered with animal noises of their own, and audiences started asking for it.

The style took its name from Denny's album Exotica, released on Liberty in 1957. AllMusic notes that half its tunes came from Baxter's Ritual of the Savage. In 1959 the album reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart and the single of Quiet Village reached No. 4, according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin's obituary of Denny.

Lyman left to lead his own group. His album Taboo, released in 1958 on a label called HiFi Records, was recorded in Kaiser's aluminum dome at the same hotel and reached No. 6. His single Yellow Bird reached No. 4 in 1961.

Then there is Esquivel, the Mexican bandleader who made a show of stereo itself. Other Worlds, Other Sounds came out on RCA Victor in 1958. For Latin-Esque, in 1962, he recorded the orchestra in two halves at the same time, in separate studios linked by headphones.

Start with: Denny's Exotica, Lyman's Taboo, Baxter's Ritual of the Savage, Sumac's Voice of the Xtabay, and Esquivel's Other Worlds, Other Sounds.

All of it was forgotten and then found again. RE/Search published the first volume of Incredibly Strange Music in 1993, and the label Bar/None released an Esquivel compilation called Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music in 1994.

Cocktail jazz

The other half of the shelf is quieter. These are records for the hour before dinner.

George Shearing. The British pianist formed his quintet in 1949 with piano, vibraphone, guitar, bass and drums. He wrote Lullaby of Birdland in 1952.

Ahmad Jamal, At the Pershing: But Not for Me. Recorded in January 1958 in the lounge of the Pershing Hotel in Chicago and released on Argo. It stayed on Billboard's album charts for more than 100 weeks.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Time Out. Columbia, 1959. Its label calls it the first jazz album to sell more than a million copies. It reached No. 2 on the pop chart in 1961, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2005.

Julie London, Julie Is Her Name. Liberty, 1955. On Cry Me a River she is backed only by Barney Kessel on guitar and Ray Leatherwood on bass. That recording is in the National Recording Registry too.

Vince Guaraldi Trio, Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus. Fantasy, 1962. Cast Your Fate to the Wind began as a B-side, reached No. 22 and won a Grammy.

Stan Getz and João Gilberto, Getz/Gilberto. Verve, 1964. It won Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards in 1965, and The Girl from Ipanema won Record of the Year.

The machines

Some of the equipment is now in museums.

Braun SK 4. Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot designed this radio and record player in 1956. It is a painted metal box with wooden ends and a clear plastic lid, which earned it the nickname Snow White's Coffin. The Museum of Modern Art has one.

Eames speakers. In 1956 the Eames Office designed a line of speaker cabinets for Stephens Tru-Sonic, in molded plywood on a swivel base borrowed from the Eames lounge chair.

JBL Paragon. A curved stereo speaker designed by Arnold Wolf and introduced in 1957. About 1,000 were built before production ended in 1983.

Clairtone Project G. A Canadian stereo from 1964, designed by Hugh Spencer, with a globe speaker at each end of a long cabinet. Fewer than 500 were made. One appears in The Graduate.

AR and KLH. For people who cared more about sound than furniture, Acoustic Research shipped a plain turntable in 1961 at $58, and KLH packed a transistor stereo into a suitcase as the Model Eleven. Henry Kloss was a founder of both companies.

The more common choice was a console from Magnavox, Zenith or RCA: a long cabinet with the turntable under a lid, a speaker at each end, and usually a radio. Those are the ones that turn up at estate sales.

Buying an old one

Expect to have work done. Repair writers at IEEE Spectrum and Hackaday describe the usual faults: capacitors that have failed after sixty years, and selenium rectifiers, an old power-supply part that degrades and should be replaced. Record changers of the period are driven by a rubber idler wheel that hardens with age and has to be rebuilt.

One caution about the records. Many consoles used ceramic cartridges that press on the groove much harder than a modern one, and restorers on the hobby forums blame them for wearing records out. Play common copies on the console and keep anything scarce for a newer turntable.

The museum pieces are priced accordingly. At the auction house Wright, a Project G sold for $20,160 in July 2024 and a Paragon for $20,000 in September 2022. A Braun SK 4, untested and wired for European current, sold there for $630 in April 2024. We found no reliable published prices for ordinary consoles.

If you find a console and are not sure what it is, the Photo Identifier will read the cabinet. If you find two, one can go in the Market.