During the 1950s and early 1960s, the musical exotica produced by performers such as Les Baxter, Martin Denny, and Arthur Lyman enjoyed international success. Widening the Horizon is the first in-depth analysis of the music and its cultural context. Philip Hayward, head of the Department of Media, Communication and Music Studies at Macquarie University (Sydney), is editor of the Perfect Beat: The Pacific Journal of Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture, and of several books including Music at the Borders and From Pop to Punk to Postmodernism. Widening the Horizon Exoticism in Post-War Popular Music By Philip Hayward Indiana University Press Copyright © 1999 John Libbey Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-86462-047-4 Contents Editor's Note, vii, Introduction The Cocktail Shift: Aligning Musical Exotica Philip Hayward, 1, Chapter 1 Korla Pandit and Musical Indianism Tim Taylor, 19, Chapter 2 Utopias of the Tropics – The Exotic Music of Les Baxter and Yma Sumac Rebecca Leydon, 45, Chapter 3 Martin Denny and the Development of Musical Exotica Shuhei Hosokawa, 72, Chapter 4 Tropical Cool: The Arthur Lyman Sound Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Hayward, 94, Chapter 5 Soy Sauce Music: Haruomi Hosono and Japanese Self-Orientalism Shuhei Hosokawa, 114, Chapter 6 Musical Transport: Van Dyke Parks, Americana and the applied Orientalism of Tokyo Rose Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Hayward, 145, Chapter 7 The Yanni Phenomenon Karl Neuenfeldt, 168, Information About the Authors, 190, Bibliography, 192, Index, 199, CHAPTER 1 KORLA PANDIT Music, Exoticism and Mysticism TIMOTHY D. TAYLOR In 1947, Klaus Landsberg, a German emigré, begin a stint as the head of station KTLA in Los Angeles. In this period there was no network support that far west, so Landsberg had to rely on his own ingenuity in devising programming for this new station. His partiality for "bright, ethnic music" (quoted by Stan Chambers, one-time KTLA employee, in Kisseloff, 1995: 174) resulted in, amongst other things, an off-beat program called Musical Adventure with Korla Pandit, which was broadcast three times per week from 1949 to 1951. Pandit was the son of an Indian Brahman, "a member of one of India's first families", he has stated, and his mother was a French singer (1966: np). He played every one of his programs wearing a turban bejewelled with a ruby, and never spoke. In this chapter I want to try to situate Pandit in the cultural moment of his greatest popularity, the late 1940s-early 1950s, focusing on a few key issues: the kinds of representations of India and Indians, both visual and musical, offered in his TV show; representations by and of Pandit; and the ways that Pandit slipped in and out of these representations, finally becoming a New Age guru/musician. The 1950s, suburbia, nostalgia, and difference Several national trends occurred in the same historical moment as Pandit's popularity; the most important of these was the growth of suburbs after World War II; this has been widely discussed and so my own discussion will be fairly brief, and concentrate on the ways that suburbanisation as a cultural phenomenon relates to Pandit. In areas such as Orange County, California (where Pandit first lived when he moved to California in 1949), the movement out of the cities into suburbs in the 1950s resulted in a near doubling in population between 1940 and 1950, rising from 130,760 to 216,224 (Jezer, 1982: 188). Nationally, as a result of the GI Bill of Rights, passed in 1944, and the tax benefits to home owners that were increased during the 1940s, housing starts rose from 114,000 in 1944 to 937,000 in 1946, 1,118,000 in 1948, to an all-time high of 1,692,000 in 1950 (Halberstam, 1993: 134). Even before this, in 1946, "for the first time a majority of the nation's families lived in homes they owned" (May, 1988: 170). The housing industry contributed to this growth with millions of 'cookie-cutter' homes, made to look the same no matter in which part of the country they were intended to be built. "Even flora varied little from place to place", writes Marty Jezer, with the ubiquitous Colorado blue spruce becoming the conifer of choice (Jezer, 1982: 191). During the 1940s, suburbs became centres of the erasure of racial and ethnic difference. Until the early 1960s they were occupied almost wholly by whites. Some residents of the whitewashed suburbs suffered a kind of nostalgia for the web of family and other social connections in the cities, as well as, seemingly contradictorily, nostalgia for the kind of ethnic diversity that cities provide. Before the early 1950s, radio and television programs had often featured a variety of ethnic groups. But by the mid-1950s television and radio had moved toward a Father Knows Best model, in which people were white, mom stayed at home, kids were obedient, and dad was an organisation man who "had no politics, no opinions, and no connection with the world