Happy 87th birthday to Lata Mangeshkar. And here’s to the great Padmini, who left this world ten years ago last Saturday.
Below are ten songs sung by Lata for Padmini. I have decided to list songs that were sung by Lata solo or with chorus but not in duets, trios, etc., and to use only one song from any film. So, this list covers a pretty wide range of movies spread over a rapidly changing period of 15 years, starting at the peak of the Golden Age. But there are two great things they all have in common – Lata and Padmini!
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P.S. For the sake of timing, I am giving you one of my all-video specials, bit I may add a little text sometime later.
About a month ago, I had the pleasure of receiving and uploading a wonderful Noor Jehan performance that she gave for the BBC (in the Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, UK) in 1976, which was apparently viewed (and taped) by many people in a broadcast a several years later (dated 1983). Most of the songs from this broadcast have been available as single-song clips on YouTube over the past few years (and I know I’ve posted some before – if not to this blog, then to Facebook), but this is the first time I had the chance to see a continuous half-hour segment from this show, including an introduction and an interview. And I was particularly delighted to view such a big segment in one sitting, but I also knew that this did not include the complete show – which is why I was delighted again a couple of weeks later, when I received the two songs that I knew were missing.
Of course, the source of these videos is Tom Daniel, who had worked with tapes originally sent to him by Jamal and Muz. So, a big thanks to all of them for making it possible for me to make these videos part of the latest batch on my YouTube channel.
I am also glad that my receipt of these videos was so well timed, because September 21 is Noor Jehan’s 90th birthday. So if you want to do some special things to honor Noor Jehan on her birthday, one thing you can do is watch these videos!
Here is the half-hour segment (or 29-minute segment, to be more exact):
And here is the list of songs (and other things), along with the times in the video when they appear:
1. 0:00 Awaaz De Kahan Hai
2. 5:06 Talk and Interview
3. 9:17 Sanu Nehar Waley Pul Te Bulake
4. 13:59 Mujhse Pehli Si Mohabbat
5. 20:04 Chithi Zara Saiyaanji
6. 24:30 Bhoolnewale Se Koi Keh De
By the way, if you want to go directly to any particular song (or, for that matter, the interview), you can go to this same list on the YouTube channel, click the corresponding time, and it will take you right there. (Although,speaking for myself, as I may have said, I love sitting back and watching all of this at once).
Here are the two songs that were left out of the clip above:
Happy birthday, Noor Jehan!
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P.S. This time around, I am not posting links to all the prior Noor Jehan birthday posts that I’ve done (going back to 2009), but you can find those links in the post I wrote last year. And for anyone who doesn’t know this yet, some of those older posts are pretty big and comprehensive, too.
Among the Pakistani singers in the batch of ’70s-80s performances from BBC TV that I was recently able to upload to YouTube, one of my favorites is the Punjabi woman named Musarrat Nazir. Her singing voice is moving, often soothing, and always melodious, and her visual presentation is very enjoyable, too. She is quite expressive when she presents her songs, and she is certainly pretty also. Maybe part of the reason that she can make such a nice visual presentation in her song performances is that, like Noor Jehan, for a long time, she was a film actress, too. Speaking for myself, I can think of only one film in which I have seen her as an actress (which I will get to shortly), while I am a little more familiar with her music. But I intend to look for her films a little more in the near future, and I know there are quite a few. (According to one list I saw, there are almost 50.) I also intend to look for more of her music.
Probably the first time I became aware of Musarrat Nazir, it was from her playback performance of “Mera Laung Gawacha,” the famous Pujabi folk song about the woman who lost her nose ring. Actually, the first time I heard that song, it was probably in a remix collection by Bally Sagoo, in the 1990s. More recently – in the 2000s – I became aware of the Noor Jehan rendition of this song in the 1987 film Allah Rakha. (And that, by the way, is the version that I posted in this blog in 2009 and in 2011.) But much as I love Noor Jehan, I’ve come to realize that the singing of this song by the somewhat latter-day Noor Jehan isn’t as pleasing as the vocal performance by Musarrat Nazir in the film Dulari, which also came out in 1987. (Plus, I think the picturization in Dulari is a little better, too, though both sequences are quite weird and both star Anjuman.)
Noor Jehan and Musarrat Nazir had actually worked together before in some prominent ways. In fact, in the 1955 film Patay Khan, Noor Jehan served as playback singer for Musarrat Nazir. This film starred Noor Jehan, but Musarrat Nazir was the supporting actress, playing the vamp who stole the boyfriend of Noor Jehan’s endlessly forlorn character.
I reviewed Patay Khan on June 9, 2013, and, looking back at it, I see that I didn’t like the film much at all, but I loved the songs and the song sequences. I was also pretty critical of the parts involving Musarrat Nazir (which I called an “unconvincing seduction”), but I think that was due to a weak script and not-so-great direction. Musarrat does a perfectly fine job acting and dancing in those song sequences.
The first Patay Khan song that comes to my mind is “Do Rahi Rasta Bhool Gaye.” Here, Noor Jehan sings for both herself and Musarrat, and she did a famous job with that, switching between two characters, two different languages (Urdu and Punjabi), and completely opposite moods. Noor Jehan’s on-screen performance is very good in this song, too – but so is Musarrat Nazir’s, and if I were to review that film today, I think I would give Musarrat a lot more credit. (Incidentally, the guy whom both women adore is played by Aslam Pervaiz. I haven’t praised him because I found him quite forgettable.)
There is also a song sequence in the film that completely stars Musarrat Nazir, in which she does some nice dancing along with a chorus behind her. She is fun to watch here – certainly expressive, as always. But once again, the beautiful singing voice belongs to Noor Jehan.
I find it strange that Musarrat Nazir didn’t get to sing for herself in Patay Khan, because she probably would have done a fine job there. (There are other female singers in this film, including Zubaida Khanum, who actually does get to sing for herself.) Of course, though, there is no way that Musarrat would have sung better in these songs than Noor Jehan… Not in 1955, that is. But in a way, she did better Noor Jehan in 1987.
I want to return to “Mera Laung Gawacha” in order to show another performance that she did of this song, this time on Pakistani TV. It is rendered quite differently here – more softly, I think – but it is still very good. In fact, in this scene, she proved again that it should really be regarded her song more than anyone else’s.
And I get the impression that Musarrat Nazir gave many of her best musical performances on TV. I guess I get that impression because I am so enamored with those BBC TV performances.
Below, I’m including all three of the song performances that I had the pleasure of uploading to YouTube. My favorite of these is the first, “Main Kamil Da Dhola,” but the other two are almost equally enjoyable, for both watching and listening. And by the way, in the second and third song, she is wearing a very nice nose ring.
I guess that will have to do for this installment of my posts about Musarrat Nazir. I say “this installment” because, believe me, I will definitely be writing and posting more about this fine singer and actress in the future.
There will be good new posts coming up very soon – honestly! But I also wanted readers to know that I am spending some time doing construction or repairs on this site as well as another, related one. Going through a bunch of posts recently, I have discovered a distressing number of blank frames where the videos used to be. Apparently, a lot of people are getting videos taken away, are feeling compelled to take videos down, or are just getting their YouTube channels wiped out. But when these kinds of videos get taken down, usually, other versions get put up somewhere else fairly soon. (They may be slightly different versions and may not be of the same quality, but usually, at least something is there.) So I am planning to replace a lot of the lost videos, but, of course, that takes time.
I have also noticed that there are still a few places where a video belongs but there isn’t even a blank video frame. I’ve cleaned up most of those problems, but there may still be a few remaining. What happened in this case is that a special URL code that I had used at first to make sure that a higher-quality YouTube video was embedded in the posts became obsolete, and so everywhere I had used that code, the video just disappeared. I’ve been trying to clean that problem up for over four years. Unfortunately, there were so many posts affected, it would have taken far too many hours out of my days to methodically find and fix all of them at once. So I cleaned as many up as I could in a couple of sittings and then cleaned them up more gradually as I caught them – say, if I was going back to an old post for some reason, e.g., I saw a post being visited via stats and this inspired me to check out the old post and see how it was doing.
Going through some older posts in this blog, I decided that I might also do a little demolition work. There are posts going further back that simply do not belong here anymore. This doesn’t mean I want to eliminate all the posts that show this blog going through different stages – including the initial period of development that I talked about in my anniversary post. It’s just that I might decide to clear out a few things that I really don’t want to see here now.
Outside of this blog, as some people know, I also have a YouTube channel. But all the videos on that channel were actually prepared by Tom Daniel aka Tommydan. (I did upload a couple of audio clips that I had put together, but they don’t amount to much.) During the first stage, several years ago, Tom let me have a bunch of his videos to show because he was knocked out of YouTube by his first suspension. This time around, though he is dealing with some similar problems, thankfully, his channel did not just get suspended again (which could mean big trouble for me and probably some other people, too). But he is reserving that channel for very old film scenes right now, and he is letting me have some newer stuff. Most of that newer stuff consists of clips of BBC TV performances that were taped at the Pebble Mill studios in the early 1980s. I am very fond of many of these videos, which happen to include a large number of clips of people related to the Pakistani film industry as well as a couple of prominent singers from Indian cinema. I have been uploading a variety of singers there ranging all the way from Musarrat Nazir to Vani Jairam. In addition, there are several delightful little dance clips.
But there is more uploading to be done, and that also takes time. (Plus, I am rebuilding some of the playlists I had made… The Suraiya list finally looks decent again!)
As I’ve said before, I have also spent countless hours at the accursed Facebook, which has detracted from the time I could spend on this blog. But now I am spending more time maintaining the blog and my own YouTube site, from which I will probably also be posting videos to this blog at some time or another. (I just have to figure out what kind of blog posts to make from them. I think there will be a few – though on the other hand, there is always the chance that at some point, those videos will get taken down.)
Anyway, lest anyone think that I have been neglecting this project, please rest assured that I am doing a good amount of work behind the front pages right now.
And, obviously, I am also typing a long post talking about all of that while putting off other, more substantive posts. But as I said, I will have more up soon!
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P.S. Regarding the picture at the top of this post… Well, maybe it would have been a little more accurate if I had put up a picture of myself doing construction… But I really much prefer to put up a picture of Padmini instead.
Yesterday was the ninth anniversary of the first post in this blog. But I haven’t really talked about this blog’s anniversaries over the years, because it started out so differently. Looking at old posts, I would say that it took about nine months for this blog to develop into the form that most people would recognize now. April 2008 really was the time when this blog fully became what you see before you. So, maybe we should say that it’s exactly nine years since this blog’s conception, but it wasn’t until nine months later that the blog was really born.
I thought of talking a little more about the history of this blog and the concurrent development of my own interests related to this blog, but I became unbearably bored. I’ve already typed two “About” pages, and though they are about four and seven years old, respectively, I think that they generally still apply.
I thought about talking a little about what will happen here in the future and the (several) posts that I am at least planning to put up – ones that I am presently working on heavily as well as ones that are on the proverbial back burner. But then I started getting bogged down in the preview that I was giving, and I was actually starting to write too much stuff that belonged in the posts, themselves. So, I decided to scrap that idea as well.
Suffice to say that in the near future, I will be writing about dance, music, and films… But I will probably be writing more about books and notes for books about dance, music and films. I also plan to post a little about someone’s interesting and pertinent research notes for a recent novel. (I won’t write about the novel unless I finally find it – but I am still happy to write about the notes.)
So, even though I may seem to have slowed down in recent times (for various reasons), I do plan on giving this blog a pretty full tenth year – assuming that we can call it the tenth year…
I have had a lot of fun in the past few days watching music videos and dance clips from the genre known as chutney, Chutney is a fusion of Indian and Caribbean music that was born in the mid-20th century, although it also comes from some long-established roots. It is played and danced to mostly by the people of Indian heritage in Caribbean islands such as Trinidad and Guyana. Wikipedia specifically mentions that the people who created chutney music had ancestors in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (who were taken by the nice British imperialists to the Caribbean to work on the plantations as indentured servants). For that reason, according to Wikipedia, it is “a mixture of Bhojpuri music, Western music and local music.” Unfortunately, that definition does not take into account the fact that apparently, in recent decades, this community has also been enormously influenced by Hindi film music.
I’ve always enjoyed different varieties of Caribbean music, so I find that the fusion of Caribbean music and Indian folk music or Indian film music can be very appealing. There is also a lot of real Indian dancing in these videos, sometimes even classical, though fused with stuff that is definitely Caribbean. For these reasons combined with the fact that I find some of these dancers very nice to look at, I don’t think I ever could ever have a bad time watching chutney performances.
Most of the material that I’m posting here is pretty new or contemporary. I’ve picked a couple of known singers, but mostly, I’m just posting stuff that I found on YouTube, some even from small parties and gatherings. It should be apparent, also, that my first priority here is to watch and show dancing. A few of these performance clips include Bollywood film songs, and I am emphasizing those, too, for obvious reasons. In a couple of cases, I have decided to include the original dance scenes for comparison. But mostly, this stuff is a bit…different from what you usually find here. In any case, I hope that at least some people out there enjoy these music-and-dance clips as much as I do!
This first song sounds much more Caribbean than Indian to me, but the visuals are very filmi. This video reminds me of some South Indian movies. The main, semi-classical dancer here is great, too (and I would love to find out who she is sometime).
This is just some dancer at some very small event. But I saw it, and I thought it was very good.
This next one is very good, too. The dancer is labeled as Sonia Hussain. Somebody in YouTube comments said it wasn’t really; it had to be someone else. But no one else agreed. Per further comments, the music here is probably sung by Sally Edwards – a highly regarded Trinidadian singer who died about five years ago – and the Gemini Band. A while before she sang it, the song was sung by Suman Kalyanpur (for music director Gensh) in the Hindi film Kundan (1972), which starred Laxmi Chhaya. Unfortunately, I could not find a clip of that. (There are other songs from around this time with very similar titles that are posted to YouTube, but this one obviously isn’t.) Nonetheless, I am still glad that I can have this version to behold!
The next song has embedding disabled, but it’s worth the extra click. This is at some showcase called Chutney Glow, probably for the charity mentioned on the sign in the back. This dancer, Sarena Basdeo, covers a lot of territory. (It even gets a little twerky at the end, which I don’t mind, but maybe not everyone will be into such a wide range of fusion.) Anyway, the first part is a dance to a classic Indian film song that a few chutney dancers apparently like to dance to; it even was labeled in one video on YouTube as a chutney song. I’ll post the original after this version.
And here is the original film sequence, from Jaan Ki Kasam. The music directors listed are pretty much unknowns to me. I won’t give them special mention here (the names are easy to find), but I’ll give special mention to the dancer, since she deserves it but wasn’t listed in the video (only in comments, which I’ll take as correct). She is Manjeet Kullar.
Princess Anisa is a pretty good singer (as well as dancer). Here she is covering “Ab Ki Baras” from Morcha (1980).
And here is the original. Apparently, it’s also pretty popular with the chutney crowd. That’s Usha Mangeshkar singing to music by Bappi Lahiri. I think the dancer is Jayshree T.
I would assume most people who look at this blog know the “Bumbro” song. (I won’t post the film clip from Mission Kashmir – I actually have done that before, a while back). These twin dancers do nicely with that and a few other things at an “uncle Engagement.”
This is a pleasing dance performed in traditional attire at a Guyana festival. The song they’re dancing to is by Ashnie; it’s a hit version of a traditional wedding song. Apparently, quite a few of the chutney artists like to cover this song (Princess Anisa does a good version of this, too).
It should be obvious that I have had a lot of fun just picking out performance clips that appealed to me without thinking that much about historic name recognition or the actual history of chutney. But chutney music does have a history with known classics, and it went through interesting phases. In the future, I intend to return to this subject to delve into those matters a little more seriously. This is far from the last time that this blog will be offering chutney.
The still above, taken from Dholak (1951), is sort of a false beginning to this post. I am starting off with this picture because I would have liked to post about Indian female drummers from the early ’50s, which would have fit well with most of the things that I post on this blog these days. But as it turns out, I couldn’t find any female Indian drummers from the 1950s. Though all the drummers in the film scene are women, I would bet that the playback drummers were men. (Also, the part of the song that actually focuses on the drumming is quite small and the rest of the song is something else entirely, which would have stood out in this post like a proverbial sore thumb – which is why I’ve decided not to post the whole song.)
I can only conclude that back in the old days, there were no female Indian drummers. I could be wrong and I would like to know if I am but it seems that there were some pretty strong taboos about women playing percussion on the Subcontinent. For the most part, they were not allowed into that musical tradition, and that is why I have ended up writing a different kind of post.
So for this post, I’m going to take (another) one of my occasional trips out of the past, to focus on some great contemporary female players of Indian drums. But even now, it seems difficult to find female drummers who actually live in India. In fact, none of the women I’m posting about here come from India, and one doesn’t even have Indian heritage. Maybe even in recent times, it has been necessary for most of these taboo-breakers to come from a place far away from India or Pakistan. That is one reason I have not called this post “Indian female drummers.” They are not necessarily Indian female drummers, but they are women playing Indian drums.
I know about a few more than the ones mentioned here, but I wanted to share my enthusiasm for these three artists in particular. The first one I wanted to talk about is someone who’s appeared in this blog before, Aminah Chishti, also known as Jessica Ripper, the drummer for Fanna-Fi-Allah Sufi Qawwali. Jessica’s story is quite remarkable. Originally from California, where she still lives for part of the year, she converted to Sufi Islam and became the first female tabla player granted permission to play in the great Sufi shrines in Pakistan. But obviously, she is far from Indian or Pakistani in heritage.
In the prior post where I talked about Aminah, I included some good information about her as well as a few great video clips. But now I have a couple more things to add… For one thing, there is a newer YouTube video that highlights her tabla talents beautifully:
In the prior post, I also included a trailer for a film called Beneath the Veils. The clip below is a longer version, which I take to be the complete short film – although it is also part of a larger documentary, which hasn’t come out yet (as far as I know). This short film is much more about qawwali than about tabla playing, but it’s also a great autobiographical introduction to and by Aminah, herself.
Suphala is a tabla player and composer who hails from my town, New York City. But she is the daughter of Indian-born parents, and she has been learning both Indian and Western forms of classical music from a very young age. Her classical tabla training has included two very impressive musicians, Ustad Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussain. (By the way, I saw Zakir Hussain live a while back, and he certainly was good!) And Suphala’s public tabla performances have included not only concerts with traditional musicians but also collaborations with a wide range of well-known pop music artists, including Yoko Ono, Norah Jones and Edie Brickell.
I looked at a bunch of videos by Suphala, and I think my favorite might be this one, in which she collaborates with several guys playing a variety of other Indian percussion instruments. I don’t know much about this and can’t really find out much, either. I just know that I really like it.
And here is a very nice Suphala solo. I hope she’ll do solos like this when I see her live (which will be soon, probably this coming September).
Since I started this post with a picture of a group of women playing the dholak, I thought it would be fun to conclude with someone who’s the queen of the similar, larger instrument called the dhol. Rani Taj is marvelous. She first became noticed by the world through a YouTube video of her playing her dhol to a pop song by Rihanna in the streets of the UK in 2010, when she was 17 years old. (She is a native of Birmingham, England, although her parents came from Kashmir.) In more recent times, she has concentrated much more on playing traditional Indian/Pakistani music, especially within the Sufi tradition. So like Aminah Chishti, Rani Taj also has good connections to the subject that I wrote about last month, the celebrations of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. And here’s something to prove that point:
[Note from below the YouTube post: Shoulder to shoulder with Ustads Gunga and Mittu Sain, Rani Taj performs at the Jashan e Sham e Qalandar 2012.]
Rani Taj is not only a good dhol player but a good educator as well, as she shows in this video made in a radio studio in New York. After a nice modern bhangra session, she explains and demonstrates different styles played on the dhol, including the Indian and Sufi dhamals.
I like ending this post in an educational way, but in addition to learning a little about styles and traditions, it would be nice to get a little more history. If anyone does know about women who played Indian drums in days of yore, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to add the info here. Meanwhile, I am still glad to grace this blog with these excellent contemporary musicians.
If you would like to contact me, e-mail to chardsinger [at] yahoo.com. I also have a Facebook timeline, where I have been spending too much time. (But it is only partially like this blog in terms of subject matter.) Anyway, especially if you know me somewhat, and you are on Facebook, you might want to connect there. Send an e-mail so that we can talk more about it and maybe exchange URLs to "friend."
