Korla Pandit and Race in American Music – Opinion

You cannot overstate American music’s influence on black culture and its artists in America for the last 150 years. Be it via authentic legends such Scott Joplin or Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Robert Johnson, Ella Fitzgerald (Sister Rosetta Thorpe), John Coltrane, B.B. King, Little Richard, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, and on to the present day, black artists have either created outright (gospel, blues) or co-created (jazz) America’s soundtrack. Despite vicious and violent racism, the likes of which today’s mollycoddled crybabies cannot even imagine, these artists and many more persevered, rewarding an often dubiously deserving audience with multiple shapes and colors of God’s language. One such artist was John Redd, whose name, unlike the musicians mentioned above, you’ve doubtless never heard.

This is exactly what he desired.

Take a look back at the 1950s. This was a time America was proud to have survived the Great Depression, won World War Two and established itself as the world’s undisputed leader in resisting Soviet oppression. It was also the decade when television’s status transformed from novelty to ubiquitous, households bursting with ever-increasing numbers of boomer babies gathered around the boob tube upon which nary a boob could be seen. Ernie Kovacs and Rod Serling, both creative geniuses, seized this new medium to express their creativity in a way that was not possible with feature films. It was also used as an alternative to nightclubs, dance halls and other entertainment venues. Others created content that was a little out of the norm.

In America’s late 1940s and 1950s, Korla Pandit was exotic yet enigmatic. Pandit is the son of a French opera singer, and an Indian government official. His musical abilities were exceptional as a child, particularly on the organ. Pandit’s talents were enhanced by his childhood in England and additional training in America, including a stint at University of Chicago.

Pandit came to prominence for the first time in 1949 when Los Angeles’ first television station broadcast it. Korla Pandit’s Adventures in Music. The show was all music, occasionally interrupted by an unseen announcer telling a brief story leading into Pandit’s next instrumental piece. Pandit took Pandit’s idea of music doing the talking and did not speak on the TV show that bore his name. He instead focused all his energy on the organ and occasionally played it with one hand, while playing the piano with the other. Pandit was often seen looking directly at the camera. His mysterious eyes from East set housewives’ hearts racing. Pandit arrived in San Francisco Bay Area around the mid-1950s. Pandit remodeled the show, sometimes speaking between the instrumentals, as he preached spiritual themes of harmony and peace, which was pure manna to Beatniks at that time.

Over the decades, Pandit’s popularity waned. Pandit kept his busy by appearing in person at places as common as pizza parlors. He preferred the traditional, old-fashioned type with a pipe organ. An appearance as himself in Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood brought career revival, and Pandit enjoyed the spotlight’s return until his passing in 1999. Long before The Beatles introduced the sitar to Western ears and Led Zeppelin brought Northern African influences to its vast audience via “Kashmir,” Korla Pandit adapted Indian scales for Western instrumentation and popularized it.

However, there is one problem.

Korla Pandit was never born.

Do you remember John Redd? The son of a Baptist minister and a pastor at many churches in Missouri, he was an actual person. Redd, a talented musician who moved to Los Angeles to pursue music in his career, quickly realized that he wouldn’t be accepted in professional music. He couldn’t join the musicians union, which was career-killing for any musician at that time. So, he took advantage of being light-skinned and having straight hair courtesy of his mother’s side of the family by passing himself off as Mexican in order to get some gigs. Redd then sat down next to his wife, who was a white woman that he had to wed in Tijuana. California law at that time made inter-racial marriage illegal. They created the Korla Pandit persona, which he kept private and publicly until his death. He played the role so well his two sons had no idea their father wasn’t from India.

Korla Pandit’s story could have only happened when it did. No one in this present information-saturated and easy research age could pass themself off as someone they are not for more than five minutes, as Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King have amply demonstrated. There is no reason to believe that someone could make an appearance as if they were from another culture or creed. We know enough information about all cultures and religions in the world. To engage an audience, a black person does not have to appear to another race. We can be grateful for this. But we also have to be grateful for Korla Pandit, which John Redd gave us. He did no harm, and he gave much joy, which is music’s gift to us, one transcending all race.