As I write this article, I’m listening to “Yennule Yennule”, wondering how do I describe the legend’s music. Should I start with the musical technicality or more on the conveyed emotion. Although I know, by the time I was born, Rahman had already superseded Raja with his western touch of Hip hop, Rap and brilliant sound design. It can be surprising for us, the younger listeners, to understand the complexity of Ilayaraja’s compositions, even with a western music sensibility. And how he managed to effortlessly create thousands of them. It is not at all an exaggeration to call him the Mozart, Beethoven or Bach’s counterpart in India.
Solace, resurgence and hope. Can you think of any other art form which can convey all these dissonant emotions together? Well, Raja did. In the song, Nalam Vaazha Ennalum from the movie Marubadiyum, directed by Balu Mahendra. Pardon some technicality here, perception of the scale is seemingly B minor…Or wait..is it? Music now taunts you with some D major(relative major) and even G major. Now you are clueless because it makes perfect sense to ears. It conveys the mess the protagonist finds herself in. His music is as closest as we can get to ourselves. We are all those, complex, dissonant and paradoxically simple 🙂
I do see one reason Ilayaraja’s music doesn’t reach across to younger listeners as much as we’d like it to. The videos. Every time I tell someone to look a song up, they’ll go to YouTube, and end up watching terrible film footage of a couple in eye-blinding clothes executing weird dance steps. Once you’ve seen those images, it’s hard to take the song seriously.
Another hurdle could be the sound design. Sounding seems fine for the speakers of 1970-80’s cinema theatres and halls. But with today’s headphones and post-Rahman-era, one can see that Ilayaraja’s sound engineers let him down on several occasions. I sometimes wish someone — perhaps Ilayaraja himself — would remove the rough edges from his songs and re-record them to make, say, the trumpets sound less strident, the tabla less metallic, and bring some high-low balance between instruments so that they don’t all sound like they’re crouched in the same decibel range.
With this post, I’m sharing my closer to the heart songs and compositions of Ilayaraja. Here is the Youtube playlist.
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