Ilaiyaraja #3: Productivity chart

Raja used to score music for lot of movies at the same and still could give lot of great songs. In these days when a single song gives a music director a few years of film music career, raja would multiple hits from many movies released about the same time. I am not saying all the songs would be good, but at least 50% of them in each movie would be really good.

As he started becoming more and more popular starting from 1976, the year Annakkili was released he started scoring more and more movies each year. I wanted to plot this in a chart and that is what you see below.

The last year he had one of his multi film hits around same time was in 1993. This is when all the so called big banner directors deserted him. By this time he had already scored music to ~ 600 films. The right hand side scale shows the cumulative # of movies, which hits a plateau around the same time. In my opinion there is a distinct sound that appears in his songs for a given period of time, which is approximately 2-3 years, after which you will see a paradigm change in the way he scores the music. More about this later with examples.

I recently discovered some great blogs that analyze Raja's music thread bare. You can see them on the side bar amongst the blogs I follow.

Ilaiyaraja #2

This past week I was watching Uthiri Pookkal, a movie directed by J Mahendiran based on a story by Pudumaipithan. The last time I watched this movie was in 1987 or 1988, i don't remember clearly. It was shown on Doordharshan as a Friday late night film. I vaguely remembered the climax. The movie begins with a title song by Ilaiyaraja " Hey indha poongathu". You can see this song here via You Tube.

I heard this song for the first time in my life and it affected me deeply. I generally like songs that Ilaiyaraja sings. He brings lot of emotion into the song and a sense of real worldness to them. You might have noticed it in the version of Thenpandi Seemayile from Nayagan that he has sung. Uthiri Pookal is an absorbing movie and as i continued to watch, later in the movie Ilaiyaraja has used the tune of the above mentioned song as an humming background by SP Sailaja. The humming starts at 2:27.

I am finding it very difficult to get this humming out of my mind since last week. I was able to find it on Youtube.

I personally like music of the kind that leaves me wanting/yearning for more. Like "Sili hawa choo gayi" from Libaas by RD burman or the innumerable Ilaiyaraja songs.

It really pains me to a great extent that Ilaiyaraja never received national award in his first 7 years of music direction.

I have been wanting to write my very subjective interpretations of Ilaiyaraja's music and what it did to me when I was growing up and what it does to this day.

I hope to meet him one day and ask him about some of his music that literally leaves me in tears like the one above.