Music And Movies

(MSV-SPB) You can read the earlier parts here: Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 , Part 5 , Part 6   Raja's coming to the scene happened at the right time. M S Viswanathan who was the dominant music director in Tamil was slowly losing his form. Let me say, his form became uneven in those time. If you look at the list of films that MSV did between 1976 and 1979, you will surprised that you have never heard of many of movies. The songs too were middling and forgettable. The other upcoming music directors at that time were Shankar Ganesh duo and Vijaybhaskar. V. Kumar too scored music for some films. Of these Shankar Ganesh would go on to score for lot of films. Like Chakravarthy in Telugu, they too would churn out tune after eminently forgettable tune. MSV though gave some amazing numbers in this period. What I was talking earlier was the percentage of good songs that he gave, which was getting lower. His combination with Balachander produced some melodies which are popular to t...

  Link to earlier parts: Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 Let us return back to the Telugu film music scene now. As I had mentioned in Part 2, with Ghantasala passing away in Feb 1974, the top slot for the male singer fell vacant. There were two competing singers at that time who had the opportunity to fill this slot. One of V. Ramakrishna and other was SPB. In the initial stages, of the two top heroes, NTR preferred the voice of SPB while Nageshwar Rao was using the voice of Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna depended on his voice being very similar to Ghantasala to take him to the top slot. SPB depended on his versatility and his ability to sing like the hero to take him to the top slot. Slowly and steadily, SPB captured the top slot in the Telugu film music industry. SPB's voice fitted easily for the new heroes like Krishna, Shoban Babu, Chandramohan and so on. The problem was with NTR and Nageshwar Rao. This was because NTR and Nageshwar Rao's voices were closely associated with the voice...

  (SPB, Ghantasala, P B Sreenivas) In Part 1 , we saw about the legend called Ghantasala who dominated the Telugu film industry. As I had mentioned, SPB had to be sing in such a way that people who were so used to Ghantasala's voice would accept his voice as well. His voice was in direct contrast to Ghantasala's voice. He had a 'soft' voice, a voice that was closer in tone to P B Srinivasa than to Ghantasala. Ghatntasala was well trained in classical music while SPB was a self taught singer and did not have any formal education. It was a formidable challenge that SPB had to overcome. SPB started his career singing for S P Kodandapani. Having heard him sing in some function, S P Kodadandapani approached SPB and told him that he would give him a chance to sing in films. SPB was skeptical since he didn't know who Kodandapani was. S P Kodandapani kept his word and in the year 1967 SPB recorded his first song for the movie, 'Sri Sri Maryada Ramanna".  This is th...

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...