Martin Denny (born April 10, 1911 in New York City, NY, United States - died March 2, 2005 in Honolulu, Hawaii) was an American musician. He was universally known as the founder and reigning king of exotica music, a type of big band music with Latin rhythms and overtones of Pacific Ocean culture that is largely scorned by critics but was extremely popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Martin Denny's breakthrough album, Exotica, Denny described the music his combo plays as "window dressing, a background".