Music And Movies

(Khayyam) Tuning for pre-written lyrics was the norm in the olden days of Indian film music. Most of the music directors followed this path, be it Anil Biswas, MadanMohan, Roshan, Khayyam or people like Rajeshwar Rao and K V Mahadevan down south. Ofcoure it was not a hard and fast rule. It is known that most of the songs of Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy and later MSV were written first by the poet, mostly Kannadasan, and were later tuned. There are known instances where the tune has been set first and then Kannadasan writing the lyrics to the tune. Music Directors like K V Mahadevan, if what I hear on various shows is correct, never ever set the tune first. They would always insist on the lyrics first and then the tune would flow. Salilda was one exception of those time, insisting, against the trend, that he tune first and then the lyrics be written. If you observe the way Salilda's tunes twists and turn, you can easily guess that tune would have come first. After Illayaraja appeared on...

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 ...

I didn't want to write a post today. Yesterday I had posted a humour article in my other blog, boigudabakwas . Added to it was some more work which was done for a Solvanam article. So I did not have the inclination to do anything today. My friend Ramachandran, who runs a very nice blog on Carnatic Music,   http://carnaticmusicreview.wordpress.com /   sent a link on twitter which stunned me and at the same time spurred me into action. (Ram had inturn got it from his friend, Srikanth,  http://www.srikanthd.com / )  There are some ragas in Carnatic Music which are very unique to it and you will not find them in other systems. Ragas oft quoted are Yadhukula Kambhoji, Begada, KedaraGowla, Anada Bhairavi, Reethigowla and some more. I had been thinking that Todi too was one such ragam, which is very unique to Carnatic Music. That would be surprising since Todi is not a vakra raga, it contains all the seven notes and as a scale it is not a difficult one to imagine. I have...

(From L to R: RDB, Devanand, Dada and Lyricist Neeraj) My friend Siva's son had hurt his foot badly in a freak accident. I was returning from the hospital and was playing some old Lata numbers in my car. This tape was given to me by Siva long time back for digitization. Suddenly the song, 'tum na jane kis jahan mein ko gaye' started playing. I had plum forgotten this song. In terms of which movie it was from, who was the music director etc. One part of my brain was trying hard to recollect this information while the other part was singing along. The lyrics, the sangathis, the interlude music. Everything was sung in perfect unison (except the pitch ofcourse.) When the charanam started, "maut bi aati nahin", I conituned singing the whole charanam and joined perfectly into the pallavi. The song was embedded deep inside and was not forgotten. I am sure to many people this is not surprising at all. Some song we knew in our childhood and haven't heard for ages sta...

(Kalinga Rao) When I had sent him the link to my blog post about Rajkumar's wonderful 'Jeevana Chaitra' song, my friend Kiran replied back with a suggestion of his own for a future post. It was P.Kalinga Rao's singing of Mysore Narasimhaswamy's 'anthintha heenu nee nilla'.  I first heard Kalinga Rao in the tape titled 'Doni Saagali'. As I had stated in an old post, this tape had songs which were based on famous poems of great poets like Kuvempu, Da Ra Bendre, DVG etc. In this list of poets there were poems of Mysore Narasimhaswamy which were tuned as film songs. Mysore Narasimhaswamy's most famous poems collection is 'Mysore Mallige'. Given that these were love poems, is it any surprise that our film directors wanted these to be tuned for movies? That tape also had another Narasimhaswamy song sung by P B Sreenivas, 'avalu yaaru'. Another nice melody. P Kalinga Rao was the only unknown name in that album. So I checked with my r...

'kodai kaala katre, kulir thendral paadum paate', thus goes one of the famous songs from the movie, 'Paneer Pushpangal' sung by Malaysia Vasudevan. The phrase 'kodai kaala katre' means 'summer breeze' and that was an apt description for some of the melodies that Malaysia Vasudevan sung. Malaysia Vasudevan's voice was not the soothing kind, a 'cool' and 'gentle' voice. He did not possess the softness of Balasubramaniam nor did his voice possess an inherent melody like Jesudas. His was a rough voice, a 'manly' voice. If the other male singers like SPB and Jesudas represented spring and winter, Malaysia represented summer. His was a voice which blazed into your ears and burnt itself into your conscience. You either loved it or hated it on the first hearing. To be honest, it was the second feeling that came over many during his initial days. He sounded like a poor copy of C.S.Jayaraman or as a poor man's T.M.Soundararajan. ...

(Komal Gandhar) Late one night I was watching Ritwik Ghatak's movie, 'Komal Gandhar'. Probably the only 'light' movie in Ghatak's oeuvre. The songs which happened till then were good and that was expected in a Ghatak movie. His sense of music is impeccable. Then this song happened, which left  a deeper impact than the other songs. It was a stunning discovery. (Buddha gained knowledge sitting under the bhodi tree. For me it has almost always been sitting in front of the TV late in night after everyone has gone to sleep.) A drama troupe is in some forest type of area and a few of them clapping hands start singing a folk song. Just as they sing a line, their song is interrupted by a female voice cutting through the night. And it cut itself a place in my heart. An absolutely minimal orchestration accompanies the song. The song is carried purely by the tune and the voice which delivers the tune. And what a tune it is. Dripping melody in every line, conveyin...