Music And Movies

  ( 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 ) Attribution: Most of the non-Raja songs in this post are courtesy my friend A R Venkatesh, a great music lover of Kannada and Tamil film music. ( @arvenky on Twitter). My knowledge of SPB songs in Kannada is limited mainly to Raja songs and to some well known hits of Rajan Nagendra (which were also remade in Telugu). I have Venky to thank for this post. I have also included his comment on SPB's dominance of Kannada film music. In Telugu film music, we saw that it was a struggle for SPB to be accepted after Gantasala's passing away. In case of Tamil film music, the emergence of Raja helped SPB a lot. In case of Kannada film music, SPB's entry was natural. Before SPB came into the picture, the most ...

(You can read the earlier parts here:  Part 1 ,  Part 2 ,  Part 3 ,  Part 4 ,  Part 5 ,  Part 6  , Part 7  ) The Telugu film music saw a gradual decline from the 1960s. The 1970s did provide good quality music but there was decline compared to the 1960s. The 1980s was an extremely bad period for Telugu saved by music directors from outside of the state, mainly Illayaraja. Otherwise the main music directors for Telugu films like Chakravarthy, in decline K V Mahadevan, J V Raghavulu et al produced lot of forgettable music. When I look back at the moves from 1981 to 1985, the percentage of movies which had good music is low.  Don't mistake me for that person who always feels 'Old is Gold'. The truth was that Tamil was having its most glorious period as far as film music goes. With Illayaraja at his peak, Tamil film music reached heights which no other film music was able to reach before or since. Malayalam too had good music directors in that er...

(Rajan-Nagendra) External intervention is sometimes required to boost  the sagging spirits. It happens in life and it also happens in film music. Like how Rahman's Tamil film songs gave a new direction to Hindi film music in later part of 90s, even before Rahman himself entered the fray in Hindi. The same thing happened to Telugu film music in the late 70s and early 80s. To me the Telugu film music of late 70s and early 80s was a bit stale. Giants like Rajeshwar Rao and Pendyala were slowly fading away and the music scene was dominated by Chakravarthy, whose music was mediocre, if I have to put it lightly. K V Mahadevan's music was bright in patches. The music was outstanding when he did movies with directors with an artistic bent of mind like K.Vishwanath and Bapu and had a tired feel when he had to do the normal 'masala' movies, where he had to compete with Chakravarthy. Ramesh Naidu and Sathyam came up with good tunes now and then but they were not 'c...

As I had promised in my earlier post, we will now talk about a music director of whom it can be said that he crossed all boundaries with utmost ease. Rasayya, aka as Raja, later rechristened as Illayaraja, is a music director who is held in high esteem in all the South Indian languages. Breaking through in Tamil with the refreshing music of 'Annakili', Illayaraja spread his tentacles all over the South and is still giving some amazing melodies in all these languages. In terms of quantity, his output in Kannada was the lowest amongst the four languages. Still, his songs hold a pride of place in the hearts of Kannadigas. A song, 'Nagu Endidhe' by Janaki, was playing one one of the FM Channels as I was driving. I had no clue on the details of this song like the movie, music director etc but I didn't have an iota of doubt about the music director. This wonderful and complex melody had the stamp of Raja written all over it. I went searching for this song without knowin...

It was I in a earlier post who wrote about the difficulty of music crossing boundaries and it is going to be me who will now write about music directors who crossed boundaries rather easily !! While I would still argue that musical barriers are more difficult to break compared to other arts, it must be accepted that only in the case of music is language redundant !! If a Japanese person like the same American movie that you do, it will be very difficult to convey what you liked about the movie if there is no common language. In case both of you liked the same English song, you just need to sing it and communication is immediately established. I have seen this when we went to a karaoke in Tokyo along with our Japanese client and sang 'Hotel California' together. None of those who sang that day had any clue on how to sing a song but that didn't stop us enjoying the song together. In that way, music is a language by itself. In India, film music is most common language in the...