Feb 26, 2017 08:04 AM
(This post was last modified: Feb 26, 2017 08:05 AM by C C.)
Exotica
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotica
EXCERPT: Exotica is a musical genre, named after the 1957 Martin Denny album of the same title, popular during the 1950s to mid-1960s, typically with suburban Americans who came of age during World War II. The musical colloquialism exotica means tropical ersatz good, the non-native, pseudo experience of insular Oceania, Southeast Asia, Hawaii, Amazonia, the Andes and tribal Africa. Denny described the musical style as "a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient...what a lot of people imagined the islands to be like...it's pure fantasy though." While the South Seas forms the core region, exotica reflects the "musical impressions" of every place from standard travel destinations to the mythical "shangri-las" dreamt of by armchair safari-ers.
[...] The distinctive sound of exotica relies on a variety of instruments: conga, bongos, vibes, Indonesian and Burmese gongs, boo bams (bamboo sticks), Tahitian log, Chinese bell tree and Japanese kotos. Additionally intrinsic to the sound of exotica are bird calls, big-cat roars, and even primate shrieks which invoke the dangers of the jungle. Though there are some standards which contain lyrics, singing is rare. Abstract, sirenish ululations, chants, vocalized animal calls, and guttural growls are common. [...] In the 1990s, exotica resurfaced, along with a new category in which to place the genre: lounge. Dozens of long out-of-print LPs were reissued on CD. The revival accompanied a related swing revival and general appreciation for tiki culture....
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Korla Pandit
http://www.korlapandit.com/
Jessica Zack: Eric Christensen grew up in San Francisco in the 1950s and remembers his mother, “like a lot of women then, being transfixed by Korla Pandit on television. He wore a jeweled turban and had these mesmerizing eyes that made women feel he could see right through them. Korla was this otherworldly, captivating guy, and we all thought he and his music were from another land.” [...] At the height of his early-’50s fame, Pandit was guest of honor at the Tournament of Roses Parade. Hollywood fans stopped him on the street. He was invited to soirees with Bob Hope and Errol Flynn, and played at the funeral of Yogananda. [A contemporary of Ed Woods, Korla himself had a cameo in Tim Burton's 1994 film.]
SpaceAgePop: One of the icons of exotica, Pandit embodies the complexities of the genre in more than one way. Pandit came to fame in the early 1950s, when he appeared on a 15-minute show, "Adventures in Music," on television station KTLA in Los Angeles. While he played some piece of exotica like "Jalousie" on the Wurlitzer, his face, topped by a white turban and and oval jewel--looking like Orphan Annie's Indian helper--filled the screen, surrounded by a gauzy haze. His soulful gaze is said to have drawn housewives into rapturous fantasies.
According the story Pandit told for most of his career, his father sent him to England and later the United States to be educated, and he eventually ended up as a student at the University of Chicago. He claimed to have taught himself the electric organ, then just beginning to become available commercially, in three days to qualify for a job as organist with a Chicago radio station, and went on to hold jobs with other local stations.
As R.J. Smith revealed in his article, "The Many Faces of Korla Pandit," in the July 2001 edition of Los Angeles Magazine, however, this, along with much of Pandit's facade, was a fiction. His birthplace was Columbia, Missouri, and he was an African-American, not an Indian, despite what his death certificate would ultimately say. Pandit was born to Ernest Redd, pastor of the Second Baptist Church, the largest black church in Columbia, and Doshia O'Nina Redd, who was of Creole lineage. One of seven children, John Roland (as he was known when he was growing up) early on displayed a natural talent for the piano. The jazz organist, Sir Charles Thompson, lived in Columbia at the same time and recalled that John Roland was considered the best piano player in town.
Somewhere around 1940, John Roland joined the large migration of blacks and whites from the Midwest to southern California. He found work as a pianist, and might have become well-known under his own name as a jazz or R&B musician had it not been for his decision to bill himself as "Juan Rolando" at one appearance. Playing Latin tunes, which were quite the rage, "Juan" found it easier to line up subsequent gigs than John Roland had, and passing as a Mexican, he was able to join the whites-only local of the Musicians Union. His reputation grew, and he moved from clubs to theatre appearances, and even landed a job playing on the "Chandhu the Magician" radio show. He also met and began living with a white woman, Beryl DeBeeson, who worked as an animator at Disney.
The "Zoot Suit" riots of 1945 climaxed a growing conflict between the white and Mexican populations in Los Angeles, and may have had something to do with John Roland Redd's decision to mutate again, from "Juan Rolando," Mexican, to "Korla Pandit," Indian. In any case, by 1949, he could be heard on "Hollywood Holiday," a radio show broadcast from a local restaurant. He and Beryl had also married after California's law against mixed marriages was struck down in 1948. Along with his new identity when his jewel-topped turban, which Hollywood had already turned into an icon of its own kitschy fiction of Oriental culture--despite the fact, as Smith points out, that Sikhs, not Hindus, wore turbans, and even then without any ornamentation.
[...] His father, Ernest Redd, moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s and began preaching for a congretation in the black area around Central Avenue. Pandit would visit his father on occasion, but he stayed in his new character all the time and refused to bring his two sons, Shari or Koram, to see their grandfather. He had also adopted an English accent and a strange manner of speaking that always stayed at vague, apparently spiritual level. His nephew Ernest recalled that, "It got to a point he didn't even speak very good English because he had talked that Hinduism or whatchacallit for so long."
Exotic Korla Pandit hid race under swami persona: [...] “It’s very hard for anyone to put themselves in the position, unless you were raised in the Jim Crow South, of what real obstacles were put in front of you,” says [John] Turner. “If you had the ambition and talent to succeed in show business, you may have done the same thing.”
[...] music and sociology experts — including Carlos Santana (who likens Pandit to Miles Davis), The Chronicle’s Radio Waves columnist Ben Fong-Torres and UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Harry Edwards — as well as with Pandit’s nephew Gary Cloud, [...] examine, says Christensen, “this amazing act, even by show business standards. This wasn’t an act that occurred onstage for an hour or two, this was 24/7, all through his life. Korla put on this persona and couldn’t take it off. Living a lie on a daily basis must have been very difficult.”
“Korla’s life story illustrates what African Americans knew at the time: ‘If I can be anything other than black, my life could change dramatically,’” says Stanford University Assistant Professor of History Allyson Hobbs, whose new book “A Chosen Exile” explores the stories of individuals who passed as someone else racially from the late 19th century through the 1950s. “If they could just twist people’s perception of them even one degree — in this case, from black to another minority — doors previously closed would open....”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotica
EXCERPT: Exotica is a musical genre, named after the 1957 Martin Denny album of the same title, popular during the 1950s to mid-1960s, typically with suburban Americans who came of age during World War II. The musical colloquialism exotica means tropical ersatz good, the non-native, pseudo experience of insular Oceania, Southeast Asia, Hawaii, Amazonia, the Andes and tribal Africa. Denny described the musical style as "a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient...what a lot of people imagined the islands to be like...it's pure fantasy though." While the South Seas forms the core region, exotica reflects the "musical impressions" of every place from standard travel destinations to the mythical "shangri-las" dreamt of by armchair safari-ers.
[...] The distinctive sound of exotica relies on a variety of instruments: conga, bongos, vibes, Indonesian and Burmese gongs, boo bams (bamboo sticks), Tahitian log, Chinese bell tree and Japanese kotos. Additionally intrinsic to the sound of exotica are bird calls, big-cat roars, and even primate shrieks which invoke the dangers of the jungle. Though there are some standards which contain lyrics, singing is rare. Abstract, sirenish ululations, chants, vocalized animal calls, and guttural growls are common. [...] In the 1990s, exotica resurfaced, along with a new category in which to place the genre: lounge. Dozens of long out-of-print LPs were reissued on CD. The revival accompanied a related swing revival and general appreciation for tiki culture....
- - - - - - - -
Korla Pandit
http://www.korlapandit.com/
Jessica Zack: Eric Christensen grew up in San Francisco in the 1950s and remembers his mother, “like a lot of women then, being transfixed by Korla Pandit on television. He wore a jeweled turban and had these mesmerizing eyes that made women feel he could see right through them. Korla was this otherworldly, captivating guy, and we all thought he and his music were from another land.” [...] At the height of his early-’50s fame, Pandit was guest of honor at the Tournament of Roses Parade. Hollywood fans stopped him on the street. He was invited to soirees with Bob Hope and Errol Flynn, and played at the funeral of Yogananda. [A contemporary of Ed Woods, Korla himself had a cameo in Tim Burton's 1994 film.]
SpaceAgePop: One of the icons of exotica, Pandit embodies the complexities of the genre in more than one way. Pandit came to fame in the early 1950s, when he appeared on a 15-minute show, "Adventures in Music," on television station KTLA in Los Angeles. While he played some piece of exotica like "Jalousie" on the Wurlitzer, his face, topped by a white turban and and oval jewel--looking like Orphan Annie's Indian helper--filled the screen, surrounded by a gauzy haze. His soulful gaze is said to have drawn housewives into rapturous fantasies.
According the story Pandit told for most of his career, his father sent him to England and later the United States to be educated, and he eventually ended up as a student at the University of Chicago. He claimed to have taught himself the electric organ, then just beginning to become available commercially, in three days to qualify for a job as organist with a Chicago radio station, and went on to hold jobs with other local stations.
As R.J. Smith revealed in his article, "The Many Faces of Korla Pandit," in the July 2001 edition of Los Angeles Magazine, however, this, along with much of Pandit's facade, was a fiction. His birthplace was Columbia, Missouri, and he was an African-American, not an Indian, despite what his death certificate would ultimately say. Pandit was born to Ernest Redd, pastor of the Second Baptist Church, the largest black church in Columbia, and Doshia O'Nina Redd, who was of Creole lineage. One of seven children, John Roland (as he was known when he was growing up) early on displayed a natural talent for the piano. The jazz organist, Sir Charles Thompson, lived in Columbia at the same time and recalled that John Roland was considered the best piano player in town.
Somewhere around 1940, John Roland joined the large migration of blacks and whites from the Midwest to southern California. He found work as a pianist, and might have become well-known under his own name as a jazz or R&B musician had it not been for his decision to bill himself as "Juan Rolando" at one appearance. Playing Latin tunes, which were quite the rage, "Juan" found it easier to line up subsequent gigs than John Roland had, and passing as a Mexican, he was able to join the whites-only local of the Musicians Union. His reputation grew, and he moved from clubs to theatre appearances, and even landed a job playing on the "Chandhu the Magician" radio show. He also met and began living with a white woman, Beryl DeBeeson, who worked as an animator at Disney.
The "Zoot Suit" riots of 1945 climaxed a growing conflict between the white and Mexican populations in Los Angeles, and may have had something to do with John Roland Redd's decision to mutate again, from "Juan Rolando," Mexican, to "Korla Pandit," Indian. In any case, by 1949, he could be heard on "Hollywood Holiday," a radio show broadcast from a local restaurant. He and Beryl had also married after California's law against mixed marriages was struck down in 1948. Along with his new identity when his jewel-topped turban, which Hollywood had already turned into an icon of its own kitschy fiction of Oriental culture--despite the fact, as Smith points out, that Sikhs, not Hindus, wore turbans, and even then without any ornamentation.
[...] His father, Ernest Redd, moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s and began preaching for a congretation in the black area around Central Avenue. Pandit would visit his father on occasion, but he stayed in his new character all the time and refused to bring his two sons, Shari or Koram, to see their grandfather. He had also adopted an English accent and a strange manner of speaking that always stayed at vague, apparently spiritual level. His nephew Ernest recalled that, "It got to a point he didn't even speak very good English because he had talked that Hinduism or whatchacallit for so long."
Exotic Korla Pandit hid race under swami persona: [...] “It’s very hard for anyone to put themselves in the position, unless you were raised in the Jim Crow South, of what real obstacles were put in front of you,” says [John] Turner. “If you had the ambition and talent to succeed in show business, you may have done the same thing.”
[...] music and sociology experts — including Carlos Santana (who likens Pandit to Miles Davis), The Chronicle’s Radio Waves columnist Ben Fong-Torres and UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Harry Edwards — as well as with Pandit’s nephew Gary Cloud, [...] examine, says Christensen, “this amazing act, even by show business standards. This wasn’t an act that occurred onstage for an hour or two, this was 24/7, all through his life. Korla put on this persona and couldn’t take it off. Living a lie on a daily basis must have been very difficult.”
“Korla’s life story illustrates what African Americans knew at the time: ‘If I can be anything other than black, my life could change dramatically,’” says Stanford University Assistant Professor of History Allyson Hobbs, whose new book “A Chosen Exile” explores the stories of individuals who passed as someone else racially from the late 19th century through the 1950s. “If they could just twist people’s perception of them even one degree — in this case, from black to another minority — doors previously closed would open....”