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 ,  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...

  ( 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 ) The versatility 1 As I stated in the earlier, SPB of the 80s was a well formed,confident singer with a unique style of his own. His association with Raja in the 80s helped him in two ways: One, he got to sing a lot of popular numbers, which ensured he took his rightful place in the hearts of the people. Two, Raja gave him songs which pushed him hard and ensured that SPB was able to showcase his versatility to the world. In this article we will talk about how Raja used SPB versatile singing to give us some everlasting numbers. Before I begin the analysis, let me also state that though SPB was the foremost singer in Tamil, he did dominate the Tamil film music landscape the way he did in Telugu and Kannada. Raja loosely followed this pattern of giv...

(Sankarabharanam) Links to earlier parts: Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 & Part 4  In the year 1980, a film was released which had all the necessary requirements to be a huge disaster at the box office. The hero was an unknown drama actor, a middle aged man. The heroine, an unknown dancer, again playing the role of a middle aged woman. Subject of the film: Carnatic music. The only two well known faces were those of Chandramohan, a middle tier hero and Nirmala, who acted as his mother. Neither of them were box office draws. The music was heavily classical music based, an anathema for Telugu film music of those times. K. Vishwanath, who had directed the film had a tough time releasing it as no distributor wanted to touch such a sure shot disaster. Finally somehow the film was released and the first week proved that whoever had shied away from buying this film were correct. Then a miracle happened. The next week on the film picked up and within no time everyone in Andhra Pradesh wante...

(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...

(Johnson) Malayalam Music Director Johnson passed away recently. I knew about Johnson, had watched him on TV where he was judging a singing talent hunt show. Also knew that he had got two National awards and he was well known in Kerala for both his songs and his background scores (for which he had received the National Award.) Unfortunately I had heard very less of the songs he had composed. Once I happened chance upon a HMV collection of 15 of his songs titled, 'Nostalgia' and bought it. I was impressed with  all the songs in that CD. Added to it I had heard a few more on youtube but overall my exposure to his music has been limited. I  anyway had  'moham kondu njan' listed in my internal database as a song which I should feature in this series. So I thought I will put it up today in honor of Johnson. As I said earlier, I had not heard enough of him to get an idea of his individuality. All I could observe is that his best songs were melodies, based on diff...

One day while driving my car to office I tuned into a Kannada FM channel heard this song. Right from the first flight of violins I knew that this was definitely an Illayaraja song. As the song progressed, I would have wagered my salary on it. I wanted to know which movie this song was from. Unfortunately by the time I reached office I had forgotten the lyrics. Given my inability to sing even the simplest of the tunes, all I could tell my colleague was, "It was a wonderful song and it went like..lalala lalala". She smiled, probably thinking that this was one mystery which even Sherlock Holmes would be hard pressed to solve. Then I saw this song on TV but as is their wont, they did not put up the film name!! One day I saw a cassette of the movie 'Pallavi Anupallavi'. Knowing it was a Raja - Maniratnam combination movie I immediately picked it up. And I was pleasantly surprised when this song played. We will listen to this song today. If you observe Maniratnam's mo...

(Shyam) Each of us has a gripe about what is missing in film music these days. Lack of melody, lack of good poetry, lack of good voices, lack of natural instruments and much more. While I too miss all of these, one thing which I miss, especially in Hindi and Telugu film songs is the sense of ordinariness in song picturisation. In earlier days, there were lot of songs whose picturisation was nothing but a capture of the ordinary lives led by its protagonists. This would come as a nice relief against the running around the trees and frolicking type of songs. Think about the picturisation of songs in movies of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Gulzar, Basu Chatterjee and others and you will immediately understand what I say. Nowadays this aspect has completely vanished from Hindi and Telugu movies. Every song is lavishly mounted. Even if you have to cry, it will against a backdrop of half a dozen dances wearing colour coordinated skimpy dresses. The music accordingly has become very loud and only h...

(Gulebakavali Katha) In the last post I spoke about Jaidev, whose talent was not given its due by the film industry. But we have to be thankful that he is still remembered by the connoisseurs today. In certain other unfortunate cases, the song remains in public memory but the memory of the creators has totally slipped into oblivion. One such case is what I will be talking about today. I first heard the song, 'kalala alalapai', during my hostel days. Those were the days when my room mate Siva and I would have the radio on continuously and keep searching for one station or the other to listen to songs. Other than the usual suspects like 'Vividh Bharathi', we would also tune into Radio Ceylon, which would play Telugu songs. (The role of Radio Ceylon in propagating Indian music is enormous. A big book needs to be written about it.) The signal of Radio Ceylon was never strong and so most of the music we heard on that channel was combined with noise. Inspite of that, we use...

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...