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Showing posts from April, 2007

K V Mahadevan and Carnatic Music

As I was writing the article on Brinda and Mukta, I realized that once I had written a tribute to K V Mahadevan and his contribution to cine music in Sangeetham.com. Unfortunately the site is down and I dont have a copy of what I posted. So I thought I will now write about K V Mahadevan's use of carnatic music in A P Nagarajan films. What I write here would be only related to the use of carnatic music in film songs by K V Mahadevan. In case you want to know more about KVM's contribution to film music as such, you should check out sites like www.tfmpage.com or www.dhool.com There are some very nice articles about KVM in these sites. KVM used lot of carnatic ragas in the films of A P Nagarajan. Let us first take the film 'Tiruvilayadal'. This is a film that not many tamil film buffs would forget. The best section, musically, is the last one involving the singer 'Bana Battar'. This segment involves four songs, of which we can safely discard the philosophical song t

Brinda and Mukta - Brief encounters

My friend Ravi had called one day morning to inform me of the demise of Muktamma. Since that time I had been meaning to write this article but somehow it has not happened. As saying goes, "Better late than never". So here comes the article. I can say that I had the good fortune of having brief encounters with Brinda and Mukta. In case of Brinda the encounter was in the form of a concert and in case of Mukta I was able to meet the great lady at her house. The concert of Brinda I heard was sometime during 1984 or 1985. I am not sure which year it was. I was studying engineering at Hyd and had come to Chennai for the summer vacation. I had heard a few of Brinda Mukta's padams and javalis on Hyd radio and had wanted to hear more. I was desperately searching for their tapes in Chennai not realizing that they had never recorded. So when I saw Brinda's concert announcement in Hindu I was thrilled and set out that evening to attend the concert. The concert was held at Sastry