Music And Movies

1. MSV : The background 2. MSV : His breakthrough year    3. MSV : The consolidation years    4. MSV : Variety and Versatility    5. MSV : The split     6. MSV : Some aspects of their style  7. MSV : Vishwanathan - Ramamurthy: Their legacy  8. MSV : Birth of MSV  9. MSV : The melodies   10. MSV : The trendsetters  11. MSV : The RD Burman influence  12. MSV: Early 1970s melodies   13. MSV : Review of early 90s TFM   14. MSV : A new competitor   15. MSV : The order changeth slowly 16. MSV : Beyond Tamil films    17. MSV : His legacy

( You can read the earlier parts here:  Part 1 ,  Part 2 ,  Part 3 ,  Part 4 ,  Part 5 ,  Part 6  ,  Part 7 ,  Part 8 ,   Part 9 ,   Part 10 ,  Part 11 ,  Part 12 ,  Part 13 ,  Part 14 ,  Part 15 ,  Part 16 ,  Part 17  & Part 18 ) SPB career spanned more than five decades and for the majority of the time, he was the dominant singer in Telugu, Tamil and Kannada. Now wonder he has left behind a lasting legacy. The most important thing SPB taught many singers is that film singing is a different ball game compared to classical music. He was not a classically trained musician but was able to emote so well that his singing style suited the film idiom perfectly. He gave hope to thousands of singers, amateurs and professionals, who may not have been classically trained, that they too can sing if they put in the required effort and tried to build their own musical personality. SPB's singing ca...

  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...

(MSV and SPB) Here are the links to  Part-1   and  Part-2   of this series In the 60s and 70s the whole of South Indian film industry was based in Tamil Nadu. It was quite natural for SPB to try and sing for Tamil movies. Tamil film world was dominated by two personalities, M G Ramachandran (MGR) and Sivaji Ganesan. MGR later went on to become the CM of Tamil Nadu and even to this day Sivaji Ganesan is seen as the greatest actor Tamil film world had produced. In the music department, it was M S Vishwanathan (MSV) was ruling the roost. In Telugu there were multiple music directors like Rajeshwar Rao, Pendyala and Mahadevan who were famous whereas in Tamil, MSV dominated the scene. K V Mahadevan, Vijaybhaskar, V Kumar, Veda and others were also part of the music scene but the best film, with exception of some MGR films, went to MSV. In the siingers front, T M Soundarajan (TMS) was the voice of both MGR and Sivaji while P.Susheela was the preferred female voice. PB Srin...

  (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...

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 ...

Last week I spoke about some lovely songs not getting their due because of being overshadowed by other hit songs from the same movie. That is atleast better. Many a times artists don't get their due because they are overshadowed by other artists of equal stature who are more popular. If the overshadowed artist has the required quality, he / she will have to keep working hard and wait patiently for their time to come. And come it will. Whatever I said above, applies to many artists but the person I had in mind was S.Janaki. She was an extremely talent singer but during the 60s and for most of the 70s, she was in the periphery as far as Tamil and Telugu films were concerned. She did have a decent run in Kannada and Malayalam films but success in Tamil and Telugu films eluded her. The most dominant music directors of those days, Vishwanath-Ramamurthy and later Vishwanathan in Tamil and Rajeshwar Rao, Pendyala, K V Mahadevan in Telugu all swore by P.Susheela. To her credit, Susheela...

Admit it. Sometimes in your younger days you had this dream of dancing like a hero, a film hero I mean. In case you lived your younger days in the 70s and 80s, it was actually easy dancing like a hero than it is now. These were the thoughts that passed through my mind when I watched a lovely song from the Telugu film 'Rajkumar'. Wonderful Suddha Saveri based tune of Illayaraja and nice lyrics by Atreya. Do see this song now and then you will understand what I meant by dancing like a hero was easy in those days. Don't worry if you don't understand the language. Just watch the dance 'steps'. (Did you complete watching the song? You need to do that so that what I am going to say now makes some sense to you.) Let us take this hypothetical situation. You are out with your spouse in a hill station like Ooty or Kodai and you find yourself in an isolated place with lot of greenery around, mountains at a distance and a milky white stream flowing next to you. It ...