Here's a request and its a great lost exotica album by that master of Japanese instrumentation
Tak Shindo. Thanks again to that scion of tikidom Tiki Tim for the original upload.
From Space Age Pop:
A bona fide musicologist by education, Tak Shindo was responsible for some of the more authentic uses of exotica instruments in exotica recordings.
Shindo
served in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Service as a Japanese
language instructor at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. After his discharge,
he studied under the G.I. Bill at Los Angeles State College (now Cal
State University, Los Angeles). After graduating with a bachelor's
degree in music, he did graduate work at the University of Southern
California over the course of the next decade, including study with the
great film composer Miklos Rozsa, and eventually earned a masters
degree.
Shindo's
graduate work took that long because he was also working full time as a
studio composer. He worked with most of the big television and movie
studios of the time, including Columbia, 20th Century Fox, Warner
Brothers, Desilu, Disney, NBC, and CBS. Among the shows he worked on
were "Hawaiian Eye," "The Dinah Shore Show," "Gunsmoke," and "The
Untouchables." While with CBS television, he penned the themes to "The
Ed Sullivan Show," "Wagon Train," and "Adventure."
Shindo's
albums for Capitol, Edison International, and Mercury all feature a mix
of eastern and western musical styles and instrumentation. Most of them
use a standard studio band with Oriental instrumentation, covering
standard Western material such as "Caravan"
and "Wagon Wheels." The novelty effect was perhaps shorter-lived than
the caliber of craftmanship Shindo put into them deserved. Although
most of his work on others' recordings went uncredited, his name does
show up on two interesting albums: The Yellow Unicorn, which
features Rod McKuen reciting his poems to a mix of Japanese and western
instruments played by Shindo and Julie Meredith; and East Meets West,
on which organist Paul Marks plays Japanese pop and folk songs on the
Wurlitzer while Shindo provides suitable accompaniment on the koto and
other Japanese instruments.
Shindo
studied Japanese music extensively and was often tapped to score or
provide incidental music for films dealing with Oriental subjects and
settings, like Sayonara, Stop Over Tokyo, and Dawn of Asia.
He collected Japanese instruments, wrote a history of Japanese music,
and lectured extensively on Oriental music. In the mid-1960s, he joined
the faculty of Cal State Los Angeles and left the studio system. He
remained active in the Nisei veteran's organization, Go For Broke, and
composed two pieces for the first anniversary celebration of the Go for
Broke Monument in downtown Los Angeles in 2000.
Gee I had no idea Tak had such an expansive and varied career.
2007323 - Tak Shindo
Thank you Sir X!
Onzichtbaredj