Singer Shaan will soon star in music composer Ilaiyaraaja’s musical. The singer says that it was while recording a song for the film that he received the offer to play a part in the film. “While recording, I realised that there’s a lot of acting involved in the singing. The tempo was changing and there were a lot of impromptu reactions to the rhythm. That’s when the director offered me the role,” Shaan shares.

Elated to be collaborating with Ilaiyaraaja, he says, “Ilaiyaraaja is a living legend. He has composed some great music. Every time he calls me to record, I feel overwhelmed. I’ve had the fortune of singing a lot of songs for him in different languages.”

Apart from doing cameos in films like Secret Superstar (2017) and Helicopter Eela (2018), Shaan played the lead in Balwinder Singh Famous Ho Gaya (2014) and a pivotal part in Daman (2001). And while he was always getting acting offers, he turned them down.

Quiz him about it and he quips, “Radhika (Mukherjee; wife) told me that if I wanted to marry her, I would have to leave acting. And I was too scared to act again after looking at myself in Daman. Music ka career accha chal raha tha and I didn’t want to become a laughing stock.”

Going forward, Shaan would want to act in films that “convey positive messages”. The Tanha Dil singer adds, “After watching a few of my recent music videos, Radhika feels ki ab mujhse acting ho payegi (laughs). I’m in my late 40s and not getting any younger. So, I thought of giving it a shot.”

Janice Rodrigues (BOMBAY TIMES; November 30, 2019)

“Music is everywhere in the universe, it’s not that I make the music, I believe that it shouldn’t be about how much music I know; music should know about me and come to me,” said Ilaiyaraaja about how he gets some of his melodies. He was speaking at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) masterclass titled ‘The Musical Maestro’. IFFI probably never had such a full auditorium for a masterclass before and this just showed how much of a fan following Ilaiyaraaja has.

R Balki, who was the moderator of the session, spoke of the musical genius saying that he can weave magic into the films with his music.“Even in the heat and discomfort of Chennai, he has been able to make people smell roses! And he taught half the country how to fall in love, just with his music,” said Balki.

The director who worked with Ilaiyaraaja in several films, said that the maestro would not be able to speak about how he makes his music, but even after 58 films a year, he still has the enthusiasm of a child and is very witty when he does speak. The music director, who truly spoke through his performances with his troupe, held the audience captive with his genius, and indeed made a few witty remarks. Upon being asked about how his process works and he puts music that is opposite to that of the scene sometimes, he quirkily replied, “Why should I tell you?” He then continued, “When I choose a film I try and see what fun is there for me in the film; I don’t want to get bored.”

Speaking more about music, he said the musician should create music that can bring people together, and try and bring heart into the film. “Without any expressions from the actor, I can compose music to show that he is thinking of his mother or his lover; which country he is in and what he is feeling, all this just through the music,” he said.

He then demonstrated his skill when Balki suggested a scene of a son plotting to kill his father and the maestro composed a track in a span of ten minutes. The audience was held rapt and sang along when they were later treated to some of his famous numbers Aye Zindagi Gale Lagaa Le, Surmayee Ankhiyon Mein and his version of Neele Neele Ambar Par.

Hiren Kotwani (MUMBAI MIRROR; November 27, 2019)

The closing ceremony of the ongoing 50th edition of International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa tomorrow (November 28) will be a star-studded affair. Apart from Prakash Javadekar, Minister of Information & Broadcasting, Amit Khare, Secretary I & B, and several dignitaries will rub shoulders with filmmakers like Rohit Shetty, Madhur Bhandarkar and Aanand L Rai and actors like Akshaye Khanna, Rakul Preet Singh, Nithya Menen, Vijay Deverakonda, Rashmika Mandanna and Ravi Kishan.

Roja actor Arvind Swami, Bollywood baddie Prem Chopra, Kathak maestro Pandit Birju Maharaj, music maestro Ilaiyaraaja and Assamese filmmaker Manju Borah will be felicitated for their contributions to cinema with their body of work. Ilaiyaraaja will host a masterclass today. He will also be performing with his team.

“The theme of the closing ceremony is ‘Ek Bharat, Shresth Bharat’. It will be a blend of music and dance,” says IFFI director Chaitanya Prasad. Hariharan will be performing, with some special compositions created specifically for the festival. He will also join Leslie Lewis to croon their Colonial Cousins’ hits. Tanushree Shankar, Sangeet Natak Akademi awardee, and her troupe will perform seveneight dance forms from different parts of India.

After the hour-and-half long musical extravaganza, awards for the Competition sections will be given in the presence of the international jury, comprising French filmmaker Robin Campillo, Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yang, Lynne Ramsay, one of the leading lights of young British cinema and veteran Bollywood filmmaker Ramesh Sippy.

Mohua Das (THE TIMES OF INDIA; May 19, 2019)

What makes for a classic Bollywood movie? A beginning, middle and an end; a hero, heroine and villain; a few challenges; and a generous dose of drama, mystery and romance. Can real life stories be just as exciting and is there any power in sharing these tales with a larger audience? Turns out, there are few things more stimulating than a story straight from the mouths of those who lived it.

In an initiative to discover, document and preserve unwritten personal recollections, anecdotes and informal tales of Indian cinema legends, the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) in Mumbai has partnered with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to co-produce and archive “on-camera spoken accounts” of those who shape India’s filmmaking legacy. The shared mission titled Oral History Project will chronicle unmediated truths in the form of audio and video interviews of how one became who they are and what they’re on their way to becoming.

The subjects of the project will span 25 filmmaking professionals including actors, directors, cinematographers, writers, music composers, illustrators, film projectionists, film lab technicians, make-up artistes and others.

The Academy’s visual history program has been recording oral histories on video and documenting representatives from a wide variety of film professions since 2012. Till date, the program has conducted more than 140 interviews in seven languages featuring film professionals including Rachel Portman, Alejandro G. Inarritu, Douglas Slocombe, Ann Roth, Rick Baker, Agnes Varda and others. The project has also collected over 2000 interviews from various sources in their bid to establish a “primary preservation repository” for filmmaker interviews globally.

It was last year when filmmaker and archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur – who set up the FHF in 2014 and been rallying to preserve India’s motion picture heritage – was invited by the Academy to deliver a keynote speech when he was approached with the proposal. “Oral history has been on our Foundation’s wish list since inception. We had begun the programme with Kamini Kaushal and were very excited at the new prospect of collaborating with the Academy which has years of experience in the area. They have developed an excellent format which informed our methodology for research, interviewing, transcripts and records. It’s heartening that oral narrative of and by living legends in cinema will be available for posterity, for researchers and scholars to understand them better,” explained Dungarpur who completed the first slew of interviews this month. “We decided to start with stalwarts who represent the three major film industries—Tamil, Bengali and Hindi. Next on list are veterans Shyam Benegal, Gulzar, Asha Bhonsle, Ilaiyaraaja, Salim Khan and others.”

The pilot slate features actors Amitabh Bachchan, Soumitra Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee; directors Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mani Ratnam, and Buddhadeb Dasgupta; and Vishwa Mehra (R K Studios’ production manager, and brother-in-law of Prithviraj Kapoor). The interviews spanning four to six hours each threw up endearing memories that will serve as a living testimony of their life.

Take for instance Amitabh Bachchan. It can be hard to imagine a chapter in the megastar’s life when the Big B wasn’t that big nor the tallest star that tall as a kindergarten boy at the St Mary’s Convent High School. “That’s the time I first appeared on stage and played the role of a chicken… with feathers,” he narrates before confessing about a time in the early phase of his career when his photograph was rejected by Filmfare for a talent hunt contest. Also, who would have thought that Mani Ratnam, the man who crossed over from the South and gave Hindi cinema some of its greatest hits in the 90s was brought up with a lot of “orthodox and constraints and not allowed to watch movies”? “I was really into maths and physics and was working as a project leader in a financial consultancy firm” when he quit and joined the crew of a Tamil film, he recounts. Auteur Adoor Gopalakrishnan spoke about how his debut film was removed from theatres soon after its release because theatre owners and audiences complained about the lack of song and dances; Ray actor Madhabi Mukherjee described the genius of filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak and his extraordinary lensing abilities including a time when he used his spectacles as the lens for a shot.

“A key thing in oral history is that the person should opt to speak without the interviewer putting words into their mouth. The questions are based on extensive research and have to be open ended, in a way that lends direction to the narrative arc and allows the person to reveal himself without being probed,” explained Dungarpur.

To counter India’s culture of dusty archives, this oral cache will be made available for scholars, students, aspiring filmmakers, journalists and movie lovers to actively engage at the Academy’s archive and museum in Los Angeles and the FHF in Tardeo. “The aim of our collaboration is to ensure long-term preservation of interviews through digital archiving. In the future we hope to develop an online access plan,” he said.

A new course in song picturisation appreciation reveals how songs have been used in Indian cinema to take the story forward
Gitanjali Chandrasekharan (MID-DAY; September 16, 2018)

Remember the pelvic thrusting background dancers of the 90s that still get a redo by filmmakers looking for a nostalgia button? Or perhaps, the swing dancers in the black and white films as the leading lady or man, stood in a corner singing their heart out? Later this month, the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) will offer a course on song picturisation appreciation — literally, about understanding the nuances of how songs are picturised in Indian cinema and what different eras brought to the screen.

Speaking about the course, the idea of which germinated last year, FTII director, Bhupendra Kainthola (left) and Karan Bali (below), the course director, say over the years everything about film songs in Indian cinema — music and picturisation has changed.

The course is a new chapter in understanding this evolution. “Songs have been an integral part of our films right from our first talkie, Alam Ara (1931). Indians have music in our blood and we see this in our lives too, where we have a song for every situation from when we are born to when we die. Various forms of Indian theatre too, used music and dance as a part of their storytelling and this continued but naturally, when cinema took over from the stage as the primary form of entertainment. I think the film song evolved to a highly sophisticated art form by the 1950s and ’60s, becoming perhaps the most important part of our storytelling on film. The best songs combined the best of writing, music and dance with a strong sense of storytelling through filmic techniques,” says Kainthola, adding, “What’s more, they gave mainstream Indian cinema a unique identity of its own. These songs were often the biggest reasons for ‘repeat value’ of a film as well written and composed songs resonated big time with our film audiences. Till recent times, it was unthinkable for an Indian film to not have songs.”

The course then will be about the film song, and its use as a critical element of storytelling. Elements will include the evolution of song picturisation techniques over the years (technically and aesthetically), the golden age of film music — the 1950s — through eminent composers, lyricists and choreographers, filmmakers who elevated song picturisation into an art form such as Guru Dutt, Vijay Anand, Mani Ratnam and Sanjay Leela Bhansali, and film songs and their picturisation in contemporary times.

Kainthola takes the example of the song Dil Ka Bhanwar Kare Pukar from the 1963 Dev Anand starrer Tere Ghar Ke Samne and says that here the developing romance is beautifully built up through the sequence where Dev Anand and Nutan climb up the Qutub Minar. “It then finds perfect expression of their love story as he declares his love to her on the journey downwards. And it’s not merely having the right situation at the right time in the story. The song should also move the story forward through its different aspects — lyrics, composition, use of choreography, locations and costumes.”

Kainthola and Bali take us through the evolution of the Hindi film song picturisation over the decades: From the stagy, static picturisation of the 1930s, the film song came into its own as all its elements peaked in the 1950s. Thereafter, it has seen its ups and downs.

Bali picks the example of the 1970s when Hindi films turned action oriented with the advent of the “angry young man”. That’s when, he says, a decline in film music began, hitting rock bottom in the 1980s, only to slowly turn around in the 1990s. “At the same time, different cinemas across the country have seen different stages of development. While Hindi cinema saw its nadir in the ’80s, music maestro Ilaiyaraaja did some of his best work in the Tamil and Telugu film world during the same period. And even as aesthetically Hindi cinema dipped downwards, filmmakers down South like Mani Ratnam showed just how beautifully a song could still be filmed. In fact, Tamil cinema has always been ahead of Hindi films as far as choreography is concerned and even today, they use the song far better than their Hindi counterparts. The traditional film song in Bollywood is struggling a bit to be picturised in newer creative manners that would hold audience interest. Of course, part of this is a higher degree of realism entering Hindi cinema, a change in audience tastes down the years — the sad song, for instance, is all but gone today,” he adds.

The distribution of  Rs 13 crore as synchronisation royalty dues by Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS) was a big breakthrough for Bollywood. Talking to BT, chairperson Javed Akhtar, writer-lyricist, talks about IPRS’ future plans to empower the artistes
Debarati Sen (BOMBAY TIMES; May 12, 2018)

Not many Bollywood music lovers are aware that whenever they listen to an old favourite on radio, television, weddings, advertisements, event, or a recreated version of it in a film, there is royalty owed to the composer and the lyricist of that song. And by law, that royalty money should ideally go to them. However, that was not happening for decades. Writers and music directors were constantly at loggerheads with music companies over this till a few music companies got together last month and distributed Rs 13 crore as synchronisation royalties that was due to the lyricists and composers. With this, the artistes and music companies buried the hatchet, finally. Facilitated by Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS), its chairperson, writer-lyricist Javed Akhtar throws light on the issues plaguing Bollywood music and their plans to strengthen it...

THERE ARE PLANS TO GO BEYOND SYNCHRONISATION ROYALTY
“The Rs 13-crore distribution due to lyricists and composers was a warm and friendly gesture by the music companies. Since there was no log of songs, the money was divided between all the members. The amount is not really huge, if you think of the possibilities in the future — this amount was given to us by only seven companies as last six years’ dues for a single limited usage. Synchronisation royalty is owed when a song is used in an ad, video or by another filmmaker in his movie. Apart from this, there is mechanical royalty, performance royalty and other such royalties, which are still pending. But the good thing is that the composers and lyricists will finally get their due.”

IPRS HAS GONE ONLINE NOW
“With the IPRS going online, people can apply for a license to use our songs and pay online. The physical transfer of money has been eradicated and this will stop mismanagement and corruption.”

RIGHT TO ROYALTY IS NON-TRANSFERABLE NOW
“The right to royalty was optional earlier — one could waver it, transfer it to someone else’s name or give it to the publisher (the producer). And this led to many artistes not getting their dues. Since the market was limited, the artistes used to sign on the dotted line. The only way they could be helped was by restraining them legally. For the artiste’s protection, royalty has been made nontransferable and non-waiverable. While copyright can be transferred, right to royalty will always be retained by the artiste.”

WORKING ON PLUGGING LEAKS, NETWORKING AND FINE-TUNING COLLECTIONS
“Our music is popular across the world, even in countries like Argentina and Peru, but we aren’t able to collect the kind of royalty we deserve. It means that our collection and network isn’t perfect. We need to spread the network, find the leakage and identify areas where we aren’t able to collect royalty properly. We have taken up these issues seriously.”

STRONG DATABASE AND SOFTWARE PROGRAMS NEEDED
“With hundreds of television and radio channels that play Bollywood tracks, the IPRS has plans to spend money to develop appropriate software and use technical facilities wherein they will be able to collect proper information globally with detailed logs. If your song is played for 20 seconds, you’ll get money. But if the music director’s spelling or the writer’s name is wrong, the money won’t reach them. You won’t get the money if a particular song isn’t present in the database. What’s needed to make it work is a complete data of all the Bollywood songs (that run into lakhs) with its lyricist, composer and publisher. It is tedious and will also cost money, but it is worth it. The collection in the South industry isn’t as good as it ought to be. I don’t think great artistes like Ilaiyaraaja, A R Rahman, Vairamuthu, Bali are getting royalties as smoothly as they should. Perhaps, we are short of people, or short of network and all this has to be looked into.”

IT WILL BE A WIN-WIN SITUATION WHEN ARTISTES AND MUSIC COMPANIES JOIN HANDS
“While the labels may have money, the kind of goodwill artistes have everywhere is unparalleled. Artistes can open doors anywhere. If our goodwill and their financial muscle come together, we can win the world.”

DNA (November 23, 2016)

Director Gauri Shinde is going to incorporate the classic Illaiyaraja song Ae Zindagi Gala Laga Le from 1983’s Sadma in her next, Dear Zindagi.

Sadma had Kamal Haasan and Sridevi in starring roles. The poignant track itself is about the vagaries of life. But the other connection? Shinde’s husband R Balki. Ilaiyaraja has composed for all Balki films and it was he who convinced Gauri to include the song.

Says Balki, “I cannot think of my cinema without two things, the presence of Amitabh Bachchan and the music of Ilaiyaraja. Ae Zindagi... is one of Raja Sir’s finest Hindi songs so beautifully written by Gulzarsaab. It fitted Gauri’s film like a hand in glove.”

Gauri’s composer Amit Trivedi who’s done the rest of the score and is known to be averse to musical inclusions on his soundtrack was fine with the track addition. “Not only Balki and Gauri, even I am Ilaiyarajaji’s biggest fan,” he says.

Neha Maheshwri Bhagat (BOMBAY TIMES; March 4, 2016)

Shaheen Parkar (MID-DAY; November 19, 2015)

In all his three Hindi films so far (Cheeni Kum, Paa and Shamitabh), R Balki had legendary South composer Ilaiyaraaja on board. He had reportedly said, “My biggest inspiration has been Ilaiyaraaja’s music; it was his music that got me interested in cinema in the first place.” However, in his Kareena Kapoor and Arjun Kapoor-starrer Ki And Ka, Balki almost went ahead sans his ‘favourite’ composer.

The upcoming film will see T-Series head honcho Bhushan Kumar turn music producer. He has already roped in Meet Bros, who have done a fresh version of Yo Yo Honey Singh’s 2012 track, High Heels. We hear there are five tracks in all with Mithoon scoring the music too.

Sources state that Balki had no choice, but to give his favourite composer a miss this time under the changed scenario. He later relented and included a track by Ilaiyaraaja since he could not imagine not having his touch in the film.

Says a source, “Balki was upset after his last film Shamitabh did not do well at the box office. With his upcoming project, he does not want anything to go wrong. So, he is following the market trends.”