The article which appears below was originally published in Krishna Tiloks's book, Notes Of A Dream. ©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.
When the sequencer came into the country in the mid-1980s, AR also became one of the most sought-after programmers in South India. He could, by all accounts, work wonders with the machine. Using a sequencer for programming entails careful arrangement of various layers of music, stacking the instrumentations and vocals of a song, to create a final product. It had the potential to create revolutionary sounds and improve the quality of songs several times over.
AR became very good at programming; it was more creative than just playing the notes composers gave him and it was also lucrative because good programmers could command a premium in Chennai those days. As soon as he could get his hands on a sequencer, AR dissected it and learnt all about how it worked—at a time when others were still trying to figure out what it was. Before long, he was one of the few people who even knew how to make ‘computer music’, as it was called, and almost no one else was as good as him.
One of the biggest and best-known of the composers that Rahman worked with was Ilayaraja, also known simply as Raja.
‘That was towards the end,’ remembers Raihanah.
Raja, in his day, was the single biggest composer for Tamil films. He began his career by making music for the Tamil film Annakili (1976), and rapidly grew to dominate the South Indian film-music scene in the late 1970s and 1980s and became one of Indian cinema’s greatest composers.
While it is difficult to ascertain the exact number of films Raja has worked on, they come up to at least a thousand—in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi. In his heyday, the man used to score and write songs for so many movies at a time that he’d sometimes even forget which piece went to which director’s film.
Every film-maker who has worked with him describes Raja as a musical factory of sorts. He could come up with a tune and flesh it out into a complete song in a matter of hours. He worked incredibly fast and his inner well of musical creativity seemed never-ending.
Visit the interior of southern India and you will find that while AR might be more popular on the world stage, at the grass-roots level, even in 2017, men and women still listen to Ilayaraja way more than they do to his titular successor. This is not without good reason—to this day, many folks with an ear for music say that when it comes to melodies not even AR can touch Raja’s brand of genius.
‘He was a genius,’ director Mani Ratnam says. ‘No question about it.’
Some of the songs Ilayaraja has done in the 1970s and 1980s are still instantly recognizable today—to listeners across generations. They still receive airplay on the radio and on television. Raja was, is and always will be an immensely prolific musician. And like most other composers of the era, he took his music much more seriously than music directors do today. Even now, he rarely performs live and when he does, it is a no-frills show. It is just him singing, or playing while his singers perform. Audiences sit and watch him, sometimes for up to four hours at a stretch. Ilayaraja hates cheering and whistling, and asks people to refrain from doing so at the start of a concert.
‘He was good and he knew it,’ Mani says. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
To this day, Raja makes music, good music, and is still a respected artist. A lot of people still prefer Raja’s songs when sitting at home with a cup of coffee on a rainy day even now. And ‘Rahman sir or Raja sir?’ is still a divisive—if not polarizing—question.
(Ilayaraja’s two sons, Karthik Raja and Yuvan Shankar Raja, and his daughter Bhavatharini are top-rate composers as well. All three of them certainly have music in their blood. Trying to make it as a composer of Tamil film music while AR’s shadow looms overhead, as one might imagine, cannot possibly be easy, but all of them, Yuvan particularly, have managed it admirably well.)
When AR began playing the keyboard at Raja’s recording sessions, the older musician quickly grew to respect him. More than AR’s musical talent, Raja respected his technical expertise. He valued the young Rahman’s talent and passion for programming, for using computers to make music.
A lot of musicians now boast of having known AR during his days as a sessions player and say he was a special kid—one they had a soft corner for because he was so young and faced with such difficult circumstances.
All who worked with Rahman during those recording sessions also remember him as being extremely quiet. He kept to himself mostly, according to all recollections. He may have had ambition in terms of ideas and techniques, sure, but he was so introverted that it made one wonder if he was capable of going out there and making something for himself.
‘Ultimately though, the fact is that he was just so talented that he would definitely have gone places no matter what,’ says Raihanah. ‘That’s my opinion.’
