Chaino was a personality of easy listening's exotica era from the late 1950s to the mid-'60s. The bongo player and recording artist, born Leon Johnson, reinvented himself as a "percussion genius of Africa," via an unusual marketing strategy created by himself and producer Kirby Allan. An itinerant sideman playing the chitlin circuit from the '40s through the mid-'50s, his fame was established with half-a-dozen exotica albums and a panoply of jukebox singles. 1957's Unbridled Passions of Love's Eerie Spectre marked his debut (reissued in 2009 as Eye of the Spectre). Two others appeared on major labels, Jungle Mating Rhythm (Verve, 1958) and Africana (Dot, 1959). He collaborated on three thematic exotica titles with the Kirby Allan Group and released Temptation: The Exotic Sounds of Chaino 1961 as a hi-fi test record on reel-to-reel tape; it received a deluxe reissue in multiple formats from Modern Harmonic in 2023.