Tak Shindo

Who was Tak Shindo?

Takeshi "Tak" Shindo was a Japanese-American musician, composer and arranger. He was one of the prominent artists in the exotica music genre during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Shindo also founded a dance band in 1947 and was a frequent lecturer and writer on Japanese music. He first gained prominence for his work on the 1957 motion picture "Sayonara," served as the musical director for the television series "Gunsmoke," and composed theme music for "The Ed Sullivan Show" and "Wagon Train." He is most remembered for the exotica albums he released from 1958 to 1962, including "Mganga! The Primitive Sounds of Tak Shindo", "Brass and Bamboo" and "Accent on Bamboo". He also released several albums in Japan during the mid-1960s that blended American and Japanese musical traditions. In 1980, he made a documentary film, "Encounter with the Past," about the Manzanar relocation camp where he was relocated in 1942 as part of the Japanese American internment policy.