I discovered this album through the Bleeding Panda blog, however as the mediafire account attached to that blog has been shut down here it is reposted. Its well worth checking out.
SHORT BIO:
The self-styled "percussion genius of Africa," exotica-era enigma Chaino was actually born Leon Johnson in Philadelphia in 1927; raised primarily in Chicago, the details of his early life are largely a mystery, although at some point he learned to play the bongos and began touring the so-called "chitlin" circuit of black nightclubs. During the mid-1950s he surfaced in Los Angeles, and with producer Kirby Allan entered the famed Gold Star studio to record a series of otherworldly jungle exotica LPs; the first, the 1958 Verve label release Jungle Mating Rhythms, featured not only a lurid fusion of African rhythms, primal chants and lusty moaning-and-groaning but also liner notes claiming "Chaino is the only survivor of a lost race of people from the wilds of the jungle in a remote part of central Africa where few white men have ever been...(he) could play seven or more drums at the same time, with such a blur of speed that you can hardly see his hands." In the months which followed, Chaino issued three more albums --Jungle Echoes, Night of the Spectre and Africana -- each for a different label; on occasion, he also worked as a session musician, and even appeared in pair of feature films, Nighttide and The Devil's Hand. A notoriously difficult and eccentric figure, however, in time he and Allan parted ways, and Chaino's activities over the decades to follow remain unknown; with the resurgence of interest in exotica during the mid-1990s, his brother George Johnson discovered the percussionist's whereabouts and briefly brought him back home to Chicago. Chaino nevertheless resumed his nomadic ways soon after; following surgery to remove a brain tumor, he suffered a fatal heart attack on July 8, 1999.
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