The interview which appears below, was originally published on Washington Post in March 2003. ©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.
A.R. Rahman may well be the most celebrated contemporary musician in India, but he’s only recently become known there as a live performer. “We just finished three shows, one show in Calcutta with 80,000 people,” reports Rahman by phone the day after a concert in his hometown of Madras. “It’s the first time in India for me.”
Rahman has a reputation as a shy performer, yet he began playing in bands professionally when he was 11, working as a keyboardist to support his family after his father died. He left live music a decade later, turning to composing advertising jingles to support himself. “I was more of a studio person than a musician,” says Rahman, who is now 37. “On stage, I was rather inhibited.”
Though the four dates Rahman played in India last month were his first as a headliner in that country, he had previously performed in several countries with large Indian expatriate populations, including Dubai, Malaysia, Canada and the United States. He played four North American dates in 2000, and has a more ambitious schedule this spring: Rahman’s “Unity of Light” tour will visit 10 cities in the United States and Canada, beginning Friday at the Patriot Center.
Some reviewers have suggested that Rahman is still somewhat withdrawn on stage, but then he doesn’t have to carry the show by himself. “I’m the bandleader and I play keyboards and sing,” he says modestly. It’s not until he’s asked that Rahman reveals that the “band” is a 70-piece orchestra, and that his vocals will be supplemented by another nine lead singers.
The multitudes of musicians are necessary to reproduce the sound of the genre that made Rahman a star: the Bollywood movie musical. Long the principal source of hit songs in movie-mad India, Bollywood musicals are sprawling, lavish productions that are regularly interrupted by song-and-dance numbers — whether they fit or not. By the ’90s, these musicals were losing some of their appeal, challenged by the pop music — both Western and homegrown — disseminated by the new-to-India medium of satellite television.
In 1991, at the ceremony where Rahman received the best jingle award for his Leo Coffee tune, he met film director Mani Ratnam. Rahman was dubious about writing movie music, but decided that Ratnam was not a typical Bollywood hack. “Mani is not the usual kind of director who uses songs as fillers,” he says.
Their initial collaboration was “Roja,” a 1992 film that featured Rahman’s first hit soundtrack. He has since scored some 50 films, including Ratnam’s “Bombay” and “Dil Se”. Other Rahman scores include Deepa Mehta’s “Fire” and “Earth,” non-musicals that were shown commercially in the states, and “Lagaan,” which saw only a limited American release despite being nominated for a best foreign film Oscar.
Rahman’s status as the international voice of Bollywood was ratified when Andrew Lloyd Webber approached him about composing a stage musical. The result, “Bombay Dreams,” opened last year in London, where it got mixed reviews but has done excellent business. It’s still playing there and is eventually scheduled to open in New York.
“It was very unpredictable,” Rahman says of writing the show. “When we started, nobody could figure out what it would be. I didn’t know if it should be in English or Hindi. But ultimately it found its own way.” (The lyrics found their way into English.)
Essentially, Bollywood is synonymous with Bombay, the center of mainstream Indian filmmaking. Yet the composer of “Bombay Dreams” has never lived there. Aside from studying Western classical music at Oxford, he’s stayed in Madras, which has been officially renamed Chennai. (Rahman’s Indian shows could have been called the “Renamed City Tour,” since he also played Kolkata, aka Calcutta, and Mumbai, aka Bombay.) He laughs when asked why he doesn’t use the city’s revised name. “I’m used to saying Madras. I say Bombay too.”
Madras is India’s second city of film, and Rahman estimates that 20 percent of Indian movies are made in Tamil, the south Indian language that is the region’s principal tongue. “I speak Tamil. I speak a bit of Telegu,” another south Indian language. “I’m just trying to learn Hindi.” The last is most common in northern India, but is the closest thing to a national language and is thus employed in Bollywood productions.
Rahman has worked with Hindi lyricists, and some of his Tamil tunes have been remade in Hindi. “Each song has its own ethnic background,” he says. “Not all of them would work in all of India.”
The composer’s music does work in all of India, however. He has successfully combined traditional elements from both southern (Carnatic) and northern (Hindustani) music with Western ingredients from classical and pop, among other sources. Rock music inspired Rahman’s penchant for unprofessional voices. With 1995’s “Bombay,” he began doing some vocal parts himself — “I just look for songs that suit my caliber of voice” — and has also used other untrained performers.
Rahman’s singing can be heard on “Aiyaiyo Kanavaa,” a track from “Mondo India,” a collection of Bollywood soundtrack selections. (Import copies of Rahman soundtracks are not hard to find, but this 2001 album is a rare U.S. introduction to the genre.)
One reason the composer can experiment with disparate voices is that he uses the latest technology to sweeten them. “If somebody goes off-key but delivers a line with the right feel, you don’t have to sacrifice the take,” he says. “You can adjust the pitch and use it.” Before Rahman, Bollywood orchestras recorded live, with little overdubbing. His style, however, is to build songs on loops and synthbeats, usually recording directly to an Apple hard drive. “I cannot live without my Macs. Most of my music is made on them.” When he does provide a score for musicians to follow, he says, “I program it on my computer and the computer transcribes it.”
Although he rhapsodizes about his Macs, Rahman attributes his success to a higher power than Steve Jobs: Allah. Born A.S. Dileep Kumar, he joined the rest of his family in converting to Islam in 1988 after they credited a Sufi mystic with curing his sister of a serious illness. The A.R. stands for “Allah Rakha.”
Relations between Hindus and Muslims have not always been cordial in modern India, as was illustrated by Ratnam’s controversial “Bombay,” a movie that begins as a conventional musical romance but turns into a harrowing account of the city’s religious riots of 1992-93. Yet Rahman seems to be untouched by sectarian animosity. His recent Bombay concert was a benefit for an AIDS charity run by the daughter-in-law of Bal Thackeray, leader of the militant Hindu Shiv Sena party.
“If you do music,” he says, “you don’t think if it’s Jewish music, or Hindu music or Islamic music. It’s a universal language.”
