If you were to ask me which singer I associate most with Kalyanji-Anandji, my answer would be instantly Mukesh. It was natural I wrote a post on Mukesh-KA in the initial years of the blog with the title, Made for each other. When I started looking for their Rafi songs as a part of his centenary celebrations I was surprised to find that he composed about twice the number of songs for Rafi as he did for Mukesh, and some of them absolutely gorgeous. That led to a post on Rafi-KA combination on the occasion of Kalyanji’s 96th birth anniversary (30 June 2024). For a youngster the most prominent mal ..read more

Continuing Rafi’s centenary celebrations, guest article by Sivanandam Palamadai on his songs picturised on not-so-famous actors (Songs Of Yore has been celebrating Rafi’s centenary year 2024 with a series of articles, some by guest authors. Sivanandam Palamdai, who is one of Rafi’s prominent fans in blogosphere, now writes on his songs for not-so-famous actors. We selected this topic after some mutual back and forth discussion which he describes in some detail in the beginning of his article. But he has modestly not mentioned one development which as the host I must, that shows his utmost dedi ..read more

Our elections are now over after a most toxic campaign. When the two formations were not abusing each other they were competing in promising the electorate moon. Voters seem to have now become smart. They must have realised that most of the promises would not be, cannot be fulfilled. There is no free lunch; if someone offers something free, something else has to give way. But one of the two principal rivals came up with a nice tagline: “My guarantee also means a guarantee that the guarantee would be fulfilled.” That is a good one, something like “Raj, Raj, Raj & Company”. In Shree 420 the ..read more

When I started this blog I never imagined that it would go on for so long. And it is not just clocking year after year. Songs of Yore is perhaps the only place where you will find a comprehensive series on Arrangers and Musicians, the people who embellished the songs with various instrumental preludes, interludes and postludes, but who remained behind the curtain. The series started in January 2023 and after 14 articles has come to a close in April 2024. Our familiarity with names like Sebastian D’Souza, Van Shipley, Anthony Gonsalves, Goody Seervai, Manohari Singh etc. may not have been more ..read more

And the SOY Award for the Best Male Singer goes to? In KL Saigal’s active years, the Best Male Singer was generally a one-horse race. He has sung great songs in 1941, too, in the film Lagan. Yet he is not a runaway winner. Nay, I would say with Doctor (1941) in which Pankaj Mullick appears as an actor-singer and the music director, he came up with a score of a lifetime. With six immortal solos from this film which I have included in the Overview Post, Pankaj Mullick is by far the front-runner in 1941. As I ran down the list of 71 Memorable Songs I counted 17 male solos divided among seven sing ..read more

In my series of articles on musical instruments starting from the grand piano I have gradually covered smaller instruments, the last being the flute. I end the series with a still smaller instrument. Harmonica is a pocket-sized most intimate instrument as you play sliding it over your lips and blow air into its holes. Behind each hole is at least one reed. The basic parts of a harmonica are the comb, reed plates and cover plates. The comb, because of its shape like a comb; the reed plates and cover plates make a sound chamber which creates melodious music depending on the skill of the player ..read more

And the winners are The regulars of SOY who have been following year-wise reviews of the best songs of the year would have noticed an interesting feature. Every vintage year was characterised by some film(s) whose music became timeless. If we had Rattan in 1944 by Naushad, we had Kismet and Tansen in 1943, and Basant and Bhakt Surdas in 1942. 1941 too is no exception. If KL Saigal is there in a year, you can expect some everlasting songs. But besides Lagan (1941), Doctor helmed by the actor-singer Pankaj Mullick from New Theatres turned out to be an artistic and musical masterpiece. It is rema ..read more

DIRECTOR’ CHAIR Hindi Cinema’s Golden Age By Manek Premchand Published by: Blue Pencil 2024 ISBN: 978-81-956660-8-9; Pages: 571 Price (Paperback on Amazon): ₹750 Manek Premchand is a familiar name to the readers of Songs Of Yore. He has written a number of books on Hindi film music and music personalities. The title of this book and the picture on the cover of a chair with ‘DIRECTOR’ written on it makes it clear that it is about film directors. If you take films as broadly comprising two verticals – creative and business – the director is the master of the first part, while the producer, who ..read more

The concluding article in the series on Arrangers and Musicians by guest authors, Piyush M Pandya (Gujarati original) & Ashok M Vaishnav (English translation), wishing everyone Eid Mubarak (As we celebrate Eid, our guest authors Piyush M Pandya and Ashok M Vaishnav mark the happy occasion with their concluding article in the series on Arrangers and Musicians. In the thirteen earlier articles, eleven focussed on individual talented artistes, such as Anthony Gonsalves, Van Shipley, Enoch Daniels etc, and two were devoted to families whose more than one generation comprising several artistes ..read more

Guest article by Piyush M Pandya (Gujarati original) and Ashok M Vaishnav (English translation) (Ramprasad Sharma may be an unfamiliar name to many, but Laxmikant-Pyarelal duo were the biggest guys on the film music scene. They broke all the records: for number of films for which they composed music, total number of songs by them, total number of songs for the biggest singers, Lata Mangeshkar and Rafi. They went through the grind, climbing all the ladders from the beginning: musician, arranger, assistant music director and finally the pinnacle. Pyarelal was the son of Ramprasad Sharma, who was ..read more