The interview which appears below, was originally published by Kalpana Mohan in January 2001. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
The epicenter was the Cow Palace at San Francisco on the night of October 8th, 2000. A. R. Rahman, a man of few words, said little until a pushy, bratty Javed Jaffrey prodded him. And then they came. The words that poured out from the maestro sent ripples of aftershocks through an ecstatic audience. “Dil Se Ree” he crooned, his eyes shut in rapture, his head turned heavenward.
“I always pray before I compose a number,” a tired Rahman tells me during a half hour interview, hours before his show in San Francisco. “And then I sit down to work with my setup – my keyboard, my computer, my harmonium.” A.R. Rahman is the highest paid music director in India today. When he hums, everyone perks up and listens. Little wonder then that they were all there heeding the Rahman baton, those men and women whose voices cajole, caress and jolt our senses in our houses, in our cars, on the way to our homes, on the way to a friend’s, on the way to Kmart.
Among the fourteen singers and six back-up singers were S.P. Balasubramaniam, Hariharan, Udit Narayan, Shankar Mahadevan, Chitra, Kavitha Krishnamurthy, Sujata, Sadhana Sargam, Anupama, Sukhwinder Singh, Dominique Manuel, Deepa Narayan, Clinton Cerejo and Srinivas. For over four hours, these singing wizards dextrously wielded their vocal wands and cast a strange spell over a sea of ten thousand heterogeneous Indian faces. “Look at that nerdy look. We should have brought our recruitment kit, man!” A female voice snapped, a few rows away in the bleachers.
Wherever you looked, there were engineers and scientists. The reviews are now in. It’s a standing ovation. “It was the most crisply executed production we have ever seen in all these years.” “Oh, and the audience was mostly so well behaved, the security agents could have taken the night off.” “And Hariharan, isn’t he the sexiest man alive?”
“His voice, it’s to die for. The tuft, nah…” “And, did you see, wherever we looked, there were those big wheelers and dealers!” “Of course I saw all those entrepreneurs. Some of those entrepreneur wives, with their mismatched high heels! Gawd!” Yes, they were all up in front in those VVIP rows, those millionaires and billionaires.
The Internet technocrats, the software Gurus, the networking stalwarts and the Java freaks – whose intellectual and technical achievements crumbled and melted to dribs of gelatin under the potent power of perfectly executed musical notes. An ensemble of fifty-seven instrumentalists was on stage to create what Rahman calls the “symphony” effect.
Twenty-two members of the orchestra were from the American Federation of Musicians in New York. Their dazzling array of instruments stumps even the mighty Rahman: “A French horn, an oboe, violas, cellos, a double- bass, a harp, a saxophone, a trumpet and many others – I don’t get to work with some of these in India, they’re amazing!”
A crew of thirty-five from India, whose proficiency ranged from the western guitar to the traditional South-Indian thavil, complemented and drew many an applause from its western counterpart. Adding spice and verve to melody was one maverick drummer whose beat caused your heart to skip a series of beats.
He is now a fixture in the Masters of Percussion concerts around the world, sharing the stage with none other than Zakir Hussein himself. Sivamani opened the show to frenzied shrieks, his coterie of six sequin-clad Brazilian percussionists belting out a jaunty rhythm on a bevy of drums. As Sivamani rapped and pounded on every little widget from his bulging bag of tricks, the Master of Ceremonies, Javed Jaffrey, bounced in with a jive, his lines unfailingly armed with a gibe.
Sivamani’s Jugalbandhi with Guru Palanivel on the thavil and B. A. Srinivas on the mridangam was sensational. As jathis and drumbeats pounced off the walls, Shankar Mahadevan jumped in to challenge them with swaras. Can you imagine hearing absolutely nothing but just one mellifluous voice, bolstered by Rahman at the piano?
Unplugged was a short tribute to the voice control and technical mastery of Balasubramaniam, Hariharan, Kavitha Krishnamurthy, Sujata and Chitra. In the words of Balasubramaniam, the six of them represented “three generations of musicians”. It was a privilege, he told a rapt audience, to work with the young Rahman to whom music was “his mother tongue”. To every song there was a unique emotional response. As Shankar Mahadevan launched “Que Sera” (Pukar), armies of screaming second- generation teen-age girls jumped off their seats and scrambled to the back where there was room to rock and swing.
If there were ever a meter to measure the mental infidelity of women in that audience, the needle would have climbed to new highs as Hariharan teased his way through a prelude of kalpanaswaras into “Sakiye Sakiye” (Alai Payudhe). “Dil Hai Chota Saa” (Roja) still continues to drive an audience wild. This was the song whose Tamil original (“Chinna Chinna Aasai”) catapulted Rahman into instant fame.
The song is now an integral part of his concerts. “With Roja, my intent was to cut across cultural and linguistic barriers,” its creator tells me. “I think it’s important to experiment with all kinds of music. For instance, I have played with Reggae in “Dil Hai Chota Saa” and in “Rukumani Rukumani” I have African chants in the background.”
Rahman credits open-minded directors like Mani Ratnam with instilling novelty into a formulaic film industry. In turn Rahman has tried to open the doors to fresh voices in an Indian music industry that had believed, for decades, that every female playback singer had to sound like Lata Mangeshkar or Asha Bhonsle.
Rahman claims he looks for new voices and seeks constantly to compose a song to suit a voice. “Anupama of the Chandralekha (Thirudaa Thirudaa) fame was one such discovery,” he says. It’s an infectious rhythm, the taal of Rahman’s dance numbers. “Rang de” (Thakshak), “Muqqala” (Kaadalan), “Ramta Jogi” (Taal) and “Uppu Karuvadu” (Mudhalvan) had the audience swaying madly in their seats.
Dancers snaked in and out for twelve numbers on a stage ablaze with laser beams and fireworks. Tender April showers rained from pastel umbrellas in Hariharan’s “Nahin Samne Tuu” as two ballet dancers pirouetted to this soft, romantic solo from Taal. Two dancers in Kathakali costumes sailed in for the Malayalam interludes in Dil Se’s `JiyaJale’ rendered by Chitra, while the other dancers pranced about in bright purple harem parents and glittering lavender bodices.
The choreography by Sanjay Pradhan, better known as Lollipop, was riveting, plunging sometimes to the farcical. For Anupama’s seductive, impassioned rendition of “Chandralekha”, men out of Star Wars clashed with female dancers holding white paper moons – seemingly, out of “Sesame Street Live”?
“I absolutely love what I do!” says dancer Carol Furtado, a fashion designer from Bombay who previously toured around the world with the program crew for Kumar Sanu and Laxmikant Pyarelal. Furtado is one of a dozen dancers who performed in the show. A freelancer who regularly turns down opportunities to dance in the movies, she was picked out by Lollipop for Rahman’s North American tour. Preparations for such a tour are exhaustive and exhausting. Deepak Gattani of Rapport Global Events, who directed and co-produced the Rahman show, rattles off big numbers.
Four truckloads of props and equipment traveled with the Rahman crew of one hundred and twenty people. “When the crew landed in New York, we put up a mockup stage inside an airport hangar – off of Long Island – which we rented for two days,” says Gattani. The performers had been rehearsing in Madras for four months.
They rehearsed several times with the American team even though the music scores had been sent months in advance to the instrumentalists. The tension – of having to deliver for large audiences who have paid dearly for their tickets – is very high for a music director whose name is now synonymous with top quality entertainment. “I could not sing at first, I was a bundle of nerves,” says Rahman, referring to his New York program where key singers had not landed at the venue one hour before the program was to begin. “How could I sing my piece, not knowing how I was going to wing the concert?” Rahman says.
Even though the musicians landed late from India and were tired and groggy, they had to go up and do their best, jet lag or no jet lag. Rahman is passionate that his music should transcend culture and language and strive to unify people. “Music is the only thing that can do that,” he says. Ironically enough, in every one of his stops, his music seems to have fired up strong sentiments. It even divided his audience temporarily.
He admits that, in New York, there were angry protests when the crew consecutively performed several Tamil numbers. In San Francisco, angry voices rose up shouting “Hindi! Hindi!” during Hariharan and Chitra’s “Uyiree” (Bombay) when three Tamil songs were sung in succession.
Unfortunately, Tamilbusters, who stalked out of Cow Palace angrily, missed out on the spellbinding number of the night from Sukhwinder Singh and Dominique Manuel, “Chaiya Chaiya”(Dil Se). This was also the song that originally captivated Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, the name behind Cats’, Evita’ and `Phantom of the Opera’. “Bombay Dreams”, a musical production by Webber and Rahman will premiere in London’s West End next year, holding Rahman up to world scrutiny.
At the Rahman concert, Karen David, the lead singer for Bombay Dreams’, ended “The Moon never stays behind in the clouds” – written by Don Black and Rahman, – to thunderous applause. Opportunities come knocking on Rahman’s door. On June 27th, Rahman performed a Sanskrit composition titled Ekam Satyam’ with Michael Jackson for an international charity concert in Munich, Germany. Luciano Pavarotti and Stevie Wonder were some of the other performers at this star-studded event.
“Don’t you want to perform on Broadway?” I ask the man whose inscrutable face masks every feeling he shows in his music. I’m sure he has a dream, a holy grail. The soft-spoken, mild-mannered Rahman gives his typical, guarded smile. That might happen, he says, if “Bombay Dreams” does well in London.
“But I’m happy. I’m happy to continue doing exactly what I’ve been doing in India for the last eight years,” this humble man adds, with a shrug. That would not do at all, for the whole world deserves to hear those beats of passion.
