The Markko Polo Adventurers

Orienta is an album by The Markko Polo Adventurers released in 1959. The album was produced by Simon Rady, arranged and conducted by Gerald Fried and recorded in stereo in Hollywood, California. The album is remembered both for its combination of sound effects and Asian-inspired music to tell humorous vignettes and for its suggestive cover art featuring a photograph by Murray Laden. Orienta was the work of three music industry professionals with a long history of involvement in exotica and easy listening music. Producer Simon Rady (1909-1965) was coming off the huge success of The Music from Peter Gunn, which spent 10 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard magazine's album chart, and won the inaugural Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1959. Associate producer Michael H. Goldsen was one of the industry leaders in popularizing Hawaiian music and was later inducted into the Hawaiian Music Hall of Fame. The album was arranged and conducted by Gerald Fried, a Juilliard School-trained oboist who later went on to fame as a composer of music for motion pictures and television, including the 1960s series Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Gilligan's Island, and the 1970s miniseries Roots. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.