Posts

Showing posts from August, 2007

A few Hindustani recommendations from a Carnatic music fan

I am interested in listening to various forms of music and I believe this attitude has given me a lot of melody and happiness. In this regard, Hindustani music, with its closeness to Carnatic music, has provided me some great moments. I wanted to share some of them here. Most of my appreciation of Hindustani music was generated by listening to tapes. (I have very rarely been to Hindustani concerts.) As can be expected, being a Carnatic music fan, I get easily attracted to those ragas which are present in both the systems. You can see that in my recommendations as well. I am sure I am missing a great number of Hindustani stalwarts and some of the canonical renditions which would be now considered legendary. If you find something missing please pardon me. My listening as well as knowledge of Hindustani music is limited. All the recommendations are for vocal music. All the tapes I mention below are available commercially. Let me start with one of the first Hindustani tapes which made a

Classical Musicians (Instrumentalists) in Film Music

I had long ago posted on this topic on the newsgroup rec.music.indian.misc (rmim) but I don't find it there now. So I thought I will write on this again. I have chosen to highlight a few classical instrumentalists who had played for Tamil film songs. The association of classical musicians with movies is an old one. Randor Guy had written some excellent articles about Musicians in Movies for sangeetham.com. (Hope there is some way to access their archive. Those articles were very informative). He writes mostly about the vocalists and composers including Papanasam Sivan, Maharajapuraman Vishwanatha Iyer, GNB etc. Let us start with the best of them first. Karukuruchi Arunachalam, the master musician, playing the nadaswaram for 'Sringara Velane Deva'. What an Abheri this is !!! Karukurichi's control over the instrument, the superb tonal quality and his effortless playing leave an indelible mark in your consciousness. Full credit to Janaki as well for matching up to the mast