Music And Movies

(Khayyam) Tuning for pre-written lyrics was the norm in the olden days of Indian film music. Most of the music directors followed this path, be it Anil Biswas, MadanMohan, Roshan, Khayyam or people like Rajeshwar Rao and K V Mahadevan down south. Ofcoure it was not a hard and fast rule. It is known that most of the songs of Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy and later MSV were written first by the poet, mostly Kannadasan, and were later tuned. There are known instances where the tune has been set first and then Kannadasan writing the lyrics to the tune. Music Directors like K V Mahadevan, if what I hear on various shows is correct, never ever set the tune first. They would always insist on the lyrics first and then the tune would flow. Salilda was one exception of those time, insisting, against the trend, that he tune first and then the lyrics be written. If you observe the way Salilda's tunes twists and turn, you can easily guess that tune would have come first. After Illayaraja appeared on...

It was like a ritual for me. I would take the local train on one of the second Saturdays and get down at Dayanannagar Station, close to which my friend Ranganathan used to live. Ranganathan was my class mate who used to be teased a lot in school due to his girth but once out of school we became thick friends in Junior College. One of main reasons was our love for music. He was one of the few who owned a record player in those days due to his father also being a great music lover. So I used to go all the way to his house in that local train in order to listen to the records which he had. I now don't remember the records I heard at his place except for one, which was part of the ritual that I mentioned. That was the record of 'Kandan Karunai' and the last song that I always listened to before I left his house was 'Solla Solla Inikkudhada'. 'Kandan Karunai' had some lovely songs and it won its music director, K.V.Mahadevan, the National Award for music. The ...

I didn't want to write a post today. Yesterday I had posted a humour article in my other blog, boigudabakwas . Added to it was some more work which was done for a Solvanam article. So I did not have the inclination to do anything today. My friend Ramachandran, who runs a very nice blog on Carnatic Music,   http://carnaticmusicreview.wordpress.com /   sent a link on twitter which stunned me and at the same time spurred me into action. (Ram had inturn got it from his friend, Srikanth,  http://www.srikanthd.com / )  There are some ragas in Carnatic Music which are very unique to it and you will not find them in other systems. Ragas oft quoted are Yadhukula Kambhoji, Begada, KedaraGowla, Anada Bhairavi, Reethigowla and some more. I had been thinking that Todi too was one such ragam, which is very unique to Carnatic Music. That would be surprising since Todi is not a vakra raga, it contains all the seven notes and as a scale it is not a difficult one to imagine. I have...

(From L to R: RDB, Devanand, Dada and Lyricist Neeraj) My friend Siva's son had hurt his foot badly in a freak accident. I was returning from the hospital and was playing some old Lata numbers in my car. This tape was given to me by Siva long time back for digitization. Suddenly the song, 'tum na jane kis jahan mein ko gaye' started playing. I had plum forgotten this song. In terms of which movie it was from, who was the music director etc. One part of my brain was trying hard to recollect this information while the other part was singing along. The lyrics, the sangathis, the interlude music. Everything was sung in perfect unison (except the pitch ofcourse.) When the charanam started, "maut bi aati nahin", I conituned singing the whole charanam and joined perfectly into the pallavi. The song was embedded deep inside and was not forgotten. I am sure to many people this is not surprising at all. Some song we knew in our childhood and haven't heard for ages sta...