Dakshinamurthy Swami - Part 2

-


Many of my friends who read the tribute to Dakshinamurthy Swami wrote to saying either that the number of songs included were less or I had missed some important song or the other. It is impossible to list all the great songs that Swami had composed but bowing to my friends demands I am including a few more songs here.

My aim here is to highlight the way Swami used Carnatic ragas in his own unique way.

We start with a very Carnatic raga, Neelambari, which is generally used in 'laali' songs. It is the raga which is used to put the Lord to sleep and Tyagaraja has composed some lovely songs in this raga including 'lali' songs. That is a separate track. Let us look at how wonderfully Dakshinamurthy Swami construct a film song based on Nilambari ragam. Ofcourse, we cannot say that the song sticks to Neelambari all the time but that is OK as far as I am concerned, since the song is a lovely one. Swami uses the raga  to create a tender song. He avoids the standard approach to the raga adopted in Carnatic music.



Now let us take the raga Karaharapriya. Here too you will see that Dakshinamurthy Swami approach it very differently. A standard approach would be like that of 'madhavi ponmayilal' from 'Iru Malaragal'. In that song the approach to Karaharpriya follows the very traditional line. Here Swami takes it in a bit different route, giving us an excellent song.



Let us now see how Swami deals with the same raga in two different ways. 'Ananda Bhairavi' is a 'strong' Carnatic raga but Swami beautifully adapts it to the needs of film music. Here is a very pleasing and energetic Anandha Bhairavi. He sort of paved the way for others to use Ananda Bhairavi in this fashion



As a proof of his versatility, here is another 'Ananda Bhairavi' based song but which sounds so very different.



Here we have a lovely Charukesi based number:



Even the widely popular 'Chandrikaiyil Aliyunnu' is such a different take on Mohanam:



As I said there are many more such songs but time and space constraints force me to stop with this song, which I am posting as a request from many of my friends. 'nalla manam vaazhga'. Swami had the 'nalla manam' to give us lot of lovely songs. May his pugazh vaazgha for a long time.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

M S Subbulakshmi : Who misunderstood her?

-
Image
In the October 1st 2015 issue of Caravan, Vidwan T.M.Krishna wrote a lengthy article about M.S.Subbulakshmi titled, 'MS Understood' with the subtitle 'The Myths and Misconceptions around India's most acclaimed musician'.  This is a long read and spans 10 pages. You can read the complete article here Krishna, as his wont, makes lot of sweeping generalizations and hand waving arguments. I just want to react to a few aspects of his article. First, Krishna starts with a straw man, with some unknown singer stating that MS was a hoax. Then Krishna goes on to elaborate on how critics never considered MS to be a great singer and thought that she was just a singer with a ‘good voice’.  Krishna then traces MS’s origins and talks about how her music changed, how the society affected her and how she could not realize her complete potential and so on. You can read all that in the article. Once you have read the article you will understand what I am saying here more cle...
Read more

One song at a time - 24. Naadamaya E Lokavella

-
Image
(Dr.Rajkumar) "Does Rajkumar sing?" asked the assistant. The music director nodded, "Muthuraju? Yes, he sings." "So why don't we ask him to sing this song in the movie?" suggested the assistant. The music director wasn't sure but the assistant persisted. Finally the music director agreed, Dr.Rajkumar sang in that movie and as the cliche goes, the rest was history. The music director was G.K.Venkatesh and the assistant went by the name of Rasayya. He would later be rechristened by Panju Arunachalam as Illayaraja!!! During my school days I had a classmate who used to love Rajkumar's voice and would tell us that Rajkumar was a great singer. It was not until I moved to Bangalore that I first heard Dr.Rajkumar's voice and the first song that I heard was a stunner. That was 'Nadamaya E Loka'. Later I came to know that this song won Dr.Rajkumar, affectionately called 'Annavaru', the National Award for the best singer. T...
Read more

SPB: A Musical History - Part 1 : A Legend called Ghantasala

-
Image
Ghantasala Venkateswara Rao (Photo source: Quora) I plan to do a multi part series on SPB, tracing his music career in Tamil, Telugu and Kannada film music. I will not be concentrating on other aspects of SPB like his acting or dubbing career. I will occasionally be making reference to some of the singing shows he did for different TV Channels. You must be surprised as to why the first part of this series is titled, ' A Legend called Ghantasala'. The idea is to give you a picture about the Telugu film music scene when SPB made his appearance. He recorded his first song for 'Sree Sree Maryadaramanna' in Dec 1966 (according to Wiki). The movie is listed as a 1967 release. So we can say that people heard SPB first in 1967. In 1967, the leading stars of Telugu films were N T Rama Rao (NTR) and Akkineni Nageshwar Rao (ANR). Actor Krishna was making his mark. The popular music directors included K V Mahadevan, S Rajeshwar Rao, Pendyala Nageshwar Rao. Other music directors li...
Read more