Korla Pandit Documentary Director John Turner

It's hard to imagine a world without televisions. Today, TVs are not just ubiquitous, they're everywhere.

But in the 1940s, television was an expensive, new gadget that very few households owned.

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.

In 1948, only ten percent of Americans had ever even seen a television program.
The only thing more scarce than TV sets was TV programming.

Radio had been widely adopted for decades, with over 40 million sets in use in the late 1940s. So, the majority of talent and advertising money was still going into radio.
In addition, television was so new that no one had really figured out what to do on TV yet. In just a few years, skyrocketing viewership would cause radio hits like Dragnet and Jack Benny to move to television. But in its infancy, many early TV shows weren't much more than radio with a picture.

The traditional radio music program was adapted to TV by simply showing the musicians playing their instruments. That was a TV show.

And, it was pretty amazing stuff by 1940s standards.

A music show that premiered during those pioneering days of television was Korla Pandit's Adventures In Music.

It was broadcast out of KTLA in Los Angeles beginning in February 1949 and had more of a hook than your average music program.

Pandit was Indian musical prodigy born in New Delhi. He played exotic themes on a Hammond organ or a piano (sometimes playing both instruments at once).
As he played, the turban-clad musician gazed wistfully, directly into the camera. 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.

What at first glance seems like a simple music program became something wildly exotic and otherworldly. Pandit's organ arrangements were accompanied by dark lighting, slow came