Music And Movies

(Sardar Malik) The Familial link Some families are musical families with the offspring taking over the baton from the parent and proving himself / herself to be an equal. In some cases the offspring is either uninterested or not upto the task. Many such cases exist. The third variety is a bit rare. The parent, a talented musician but unfortunately not getting due recognition but the offspring going on to achieve lot of fame. The most classic example of this would be R.K.Shekar and his son. R.K.Shekar, though a very talented music director, never made it big commercially. His son Dileep on the other hand went on to achieve international stardom. Ofcourse, you would know Dileep as A.R.Rahman. We will talk about one more such talented music director, who unfortunately did not get his due from the film industry. His name is Sardar Mallik. His son Anu Mallik later became a very popular music director in the Hindi film industry. The song I want you to listen to today is 'saranga ter

Update: One of my good friends, who is a also a musician, wrote to me to say that the rock songs that I had quoted do not strictly follow the scale of Mohanam and the suddha madhyamam and nishadam do peep in. In other words they are not strictly following the pentatonic scale. I wouldn't doubt his take on this subject. I could 'hear' Mohanam in them so I put them there but someone technically may make out that this is not the pentatonic scale. I would still leave these clips here for two reasons: One, they are nice songs. So no harm hearing them, even if they are not pentatonic. Two, it sort of tell me that I still have a long way to go when it comes to matters of music. // End Update Some scales / ragas seem to affect all of humanity. Mohanam is one such ragam which is found in different musical systems. I had written about this briefly when I wrote the article on Kalyani and Mohanam: The versatile cousins. Today I want to give you some examples and convince you that M

(Panju Arunachalam) Almost anyone who is out of his / her comfort zone longs to be back to the comforting lap of familiarity. It was the same with me in Hyderabad in the olden days as far as Tamil film songs were concerned. I used to listen to Telugu and Hindi songs throughout the day. And seven days a week. And I loved those songs. Yet, Tamil film songs, by the sheer familiarity of the language, sounded additionally sweet to my ears. Especially since they were not easily available. I used to tune in at 4pm on Sundays when Madras AIR would broadcast the latest songs and also at 10pm on Monday evening, when the same radio station would broadcast old classics. The Sunday songs were not a given to me since we would go out to play some sports but my ears were glued to the radio on Monday nights. I did not want to miss out hearing those great songs. To give credit where due, whoever chose the songs had great taste and here is where I heard all the standard classics of Tamil film