Korla Pandit

Korla Pandit (September 16, 1921 – October 2, 1998), born John Roland Redd, was a musician, composer, pianist, organist and television pioneer. He was known as the Godfather of Exotica.

A Missouri-born African-American, Pandit spent his career (until his death) passing as an Indian.

In 1921, Pandit was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to an African-American family. The next year, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where they lived for nine years. In 1931 the family moved to Columbia, Missouri. Pandit's father was Ernest Redd, an African-American man and Baptist pastor, and his mother was Doshia O'Nina Redd, of French and African ancestry. Pandit had two brothers and four sisters, all light-skinned like him. He attended a segregated school and learned to play piano. A contemporary of his, jazz pianist "Sir" Charles Thompson, knew him during that time; he said that John Roland Redd was the better piano player.

During the mid-1940s, as Juan Rolando, he played the organ on the Los Angeles radio station KMPC, and he performed in various supper clubs and lounges. Performing as Juan Rolando, he was also heard on the Rudy Vallée Show and Jubilee, the program of black jazz and swing bands transcribed by the Special Services of the War Department for airing to WWII servicemen overseas.

In 1944, he married Disney artist Beryl June DeBeeson, and the two reinvented his image, eventually replacing "Juan Rolando" with "Korla Pandit" and fabricating a romantic history for him as a baby born in New Delhi, India to a Brahmin priest and a French opera singer, who traveled from India via England, finally arriving in the United States.

...
Wikipedia