Korla Pandit’s Adventures in Music was the first all-music show on television and it was an instant hit after debuting in 1948, airing five days a week for over 900 episodes. TV Guide named it the “Best Show” in Los Angeles, Pandit won the magazine’s “Top Male Personality” honors and for the next couple decades he released over two dozen records.
Even though Pandit was silent on camera, friends joked that he couldn’t shut up in person. He loved to talk about his privileged childhood in New Delhi, where his father was a government bureaucrat and friend of Mohandas Gandhi. The musician also claimed that his mother was a French opera singer, though the truth was more mundane: Pandit was actually a black man from the Midwest. “He was light-skinned, about the color of General Colin Powell,” said Stan Freberg, who worked with him at KTLA. “To tell you the truth, I think Korla Pandit invented himself.”
Pandit was born in 1921 as John Roland Redd, a native of St. Louis who began his radio career at a CBS affiliate in Iowa. In the late-1930s he followed several of his sisters out to Southern California, where he worked as a staff musician on network radio shows. Redd first took the name Juan Rolando and performed everything from country and western to big-band jazz. Then, in 1948, he dropped his Mexican identity for something more unique, changing his name to Korla Pandit. That year he recorded “Stampede” with Roy Rogers and Sons of the Pioneers, who dubbed him “Cactus Pandit” (it was surely the first—and last?—time an African-American man passing as turban-clad Indian ever played on a country record).
Korla’s beautiful blonde wife Beryl Pandit was instrumental in crafting his persona: a TV swami with hypnotic musical powers. The former Disney Studios airbrush artist designed the sets, worked with lighting technicians and costumed her husband. Outside of the television studio, he remained a seasoned jazz musician who occasionally sat in on jam sessions with his idol Art Tatum, who took a liking to the organist. But when playing as Korla Pandit, he stripped any trace of African-American musical styles from his repertoire to deflect unwanted scrutiny into his background. He died in 1998 having never told his two sons, Shari and Koram, the truth about his past.
Korla Pandit remained silent on camera in part because his Indian accent didn’t really pass muster, nor did his outfit. Hindus typically didn’t wear turbans—those were Sikhs, and they didn’t put jewels in their headdress—but most Americans were not particularly attuned to these distinctions. He complemented his foreign headgear with a coat and tie, personifying the post-war stereotype of an Indian: a blend of mystical and modern. Pandit believed in music’s potential to communicate across racial lines, but this utopian impulse was undermined by colonialist clichés. Adventures in Music presented Pandit as an unspeaking “Other” placed on display for the voyeuristic pleasure of Western eyes. He subverted these ideological constraints to a certain extent by staring back at the viewer, sometimes looking into the camera for minutes at a time without blinking.
An entire program with no talking and only organ music surely would not fly today, but the rules of television were still up for grabs back then. No one really knew what TV was supposed to be. KTLA’s eclecticism can also be explained by the fact that it was an independent broadcaster, which gave it a flexibility its larger network competitors lacked. Shows were live, rough around the edges and offered a dizzying variety of entertainment. Music was popular, and the station’s biggest shows included Liberace, Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians and Ina Ray Hutton and Her All-Girl Orchestra.
There were also cooking programs, puppet theater, a variety show on ice and a strange comedy named Yer Ole Buddy, where a flustered man tried to explain the machinations of a television studio to curious viewers. Oddest of all was KTLA’s decision to broadcast an atomic explosion live from Nevada. “All this was done without any advance publicity,” said Johnny Polich, who worked at the station. “Thirty seconds before the blast, we cut the food show off the air and just went on.” That must have made for some jarring viewing!
Early television created a semi-anarchic opening for pop-culture trickster figures to slip through the door and shape this new medium in their own image. With enough luck, and pluck, border crossing outsiders could become insiders. This gave a Jim Crow-era black man access to the nation’s airwaves, enabling Korla Pandit to broadcast from an alternate universe located within his own imagination. “To have seen him on television,” biographer R.J. Smith noted in The Great Black Way, “was to inhabit a perfumed realm.”
The DVD, Korla is now out and available through http://www.korlathemovie.com