Music And Movies

(Kanu Roy) Kanu Roy is not a well-known music director. He has worked only on a few Hindi films and yet he has given songs which are long lasting. I will put up a few of them here. First up, this lovely song 'boliye surili boliya' from the film 'Grihavpravesh'. The lyrics of Gulzar.  Sung by Bhupinder and Sulakshana Pandit. I would suggest you listen to the song and not see the visuals :) The song setup is very nice. The melody is top class and Sulakshana Pandit does the fun part very well. This is the domain of people like SPB and Janaki. Sulakshana Pandit matches them in this regard. I had first heard of Kanu Roy when I heard a Manna Dey song 'phir kahin kohi phool kila'. I came to know Kanu Roy was a friend of Basu Bhattacharya and gave the music to some of his films. Here is the lovely 'phir kahin' Kanu Roy also gave us another melodic Manna Dey number 'hanse ki chaha ne' from 'Avishkar' And finally, it was Kanu ...

Recently, 'Rajavin Ramanamalai' was released. This title could cause some confusion as a title named 'Ramanamalai' with Raja's tunes had been released earlier. As it stands, we have two Ramanamalais. I am going to write my opinion on the second Ramanamalai. This album has a total of 10 songs, 8 of which are tuned by Raja and 2 of them tuned by a person called KVS and orchestrated by Raja. Let's have a look at the songs. Except for the Bombay Jayashree song, 'arunagiri ramanan', all songs start with a small speech of Raja, wherein he talks about Ramana Maharishi. I am including samples of some songs. You can buy the album here:  http://bookstore.sriramanamaharshi.org/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=180&products_id=6679 'thirunalum' - Sung by Raja . This is a wonderful tune. Very simple and touching. I am not sure which raga this is based on. Is it Pahadi? If you know, let me know. The song has a lovely bass line. The orch...

It was in 1990s that I got interested in Hindustani music. Till then film, carnatic, rock and especially blues, were my staple diet. Those were the days of newsgroups and I joined the famous rmic and rmim newsgroups. In rmic, a lot of Hindustani music discussions happened. My interest in Hindustani music was kindled then. The best way to get introduced to a musical form is to hear the masters of that form. So I started buying tapes of Hindustani masters. One of the earliest tapes I bought was that of Kishori Amonkar in which she had sung 'Bhoop' and 'Bageshree'. Sometimes without your knowledge, you hit gold. This was one such serendipitous occurrence. What I didn't know at that time was that the Bhoop that Kishori Amonkar sang was what Zakhir Hussain would later comment on as, "Some creations will last forever. Kishori Tai's Bhoop is one such creation". It was easy to be charmed by this raga because it is the Mohanam of the north. The familiari...