Wurster also reveals the surprising inspiration for the voice of one of his most notorious Best Show characters, Philly Boy Roy. We talk to Wurster about his early days in the Philly punk scene in the 1980s, becoming a professional musician and coping with life on the road. The Best Show aired for 13 years, and an exhaustive collection of the show’s shenanigans featuring Wurster’s crazy personnas, has just been released as a box set. Scharpling and Wurster struck up a friendship, and Wurster started regularly calling into Scharpling’s radio show, voicing different characters. Tom Scharpling was the host of a radio show which originally aired on WFMU. He’s also half of the comedy team Scharpling and Wurster. Korla – Trailer from Appleberry Pictures on Vimeo.Īs a musician, Jon Wurster is best-known as the drummer for Superchunk, The Mountain Goats, New Pornographers and The Bob Mould Band. It’s a secret that wasn’t discovered until years after his death. And it’s based on a secret that Pandit kept hidden even from his own family. It also tells a story that turns out to be uniquely American. The documentary doesn’t just tell the lost story of a TV pioneer or an Indian musician. He reclaimed some of his fame during the exotica / lounge revival of the 1990s, but passed away shortly after.ĭirector John Turner has just finished a feature documentary about Pandit’s life called Korla.

Korla Pandit’s celebrity faded, but he worked as a musician and a music teacher, and continued releasing albums through 1971. Pandit and other exotica musicians fell out of favor. His music laid a foundation the exotica genre, made famous in the 1950s by musicians like Les Baxter, Martin Denny and Yma Sumac.īut what seemed wild in the uptight days of 1948 was considered laughably tame by the freaky-deaky standards of 1968. He became friends with eastern religious figures and released dozens of albums. In 1951, he played a two-hour concert at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and was called back for three encores.Ī version of the show was syndicated to independent TV stations nationwide and he became a huge hit. Pandit’s show aired during TV’s boom years and he became wildly popular. Over 900 episodes were aired, but only a few survive to this day. He performed Adventures In Music live on the air, five days a week. The resulting show was all at once hypnotic, noir, exotic and surreal. Pandit’s organ arrangements were accompanied by dark lighting, slow camera moves and close-ups of his eyes. What at first glance seems like a simple music program became something wildly exotic and otherworldly. His only communication with the viewer was through his transe-like stare and what he called “the universal language of music.” He never spoke on the show. As he played, the turban-clad musician gazed wistfully, directly into the camera. He played exotic themes on a Hammond organ or a piano (sometimes playing both instruments at once). Pandit was Indian musical prodigy born in New Delhi. It was broadcast out of KTLA in Los Angeles beginning in February 1949 and had more of a hook than your average music program. And, it was pretty amazing stuff by 1940s standards.Ī music show that premiered during those pioneering days of television was Korla Pandit’s Adventures In Music. The traditional radio music program was adapted to TV by simply showing the musicians playing their instruments. But in its infancy, many early TV shows weren’t much more than radio with a picture. In just a few years, skyrocketing viewership would cause radio hits like Dragnet and Jack Benny to move to television. In addition, television was so new that no one had really figured out what to do on TV yet. So, the majority of talent and advertising money was still going into radio. Radio had been widely adopted for decades, with over 40 million sets in use in the late 1940s. The only thing more scarce than TV sets was TV programming. In 1948, only ten percent of Americans had ever even seen a television program. When the World Series was televised for the first time in 1947, only 44,000 TV sets were in use in the entire U.S. But in the 1940s, television was an expensive, new gadget that very few households owned. Today, TVs are not just ubiquitous, they’re everywhere. It’s hard to imagine a world without televisions.

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