Endrendrum Raja - Live Concert by Ilaiyaraaja in Chennai on Dec 28

I attended the previous Ilaiyaraaja Live Concert in Chennai in the year 2005 and it was just great. Around 5 hours of pure awesomeness. All songs performed were 100% pure live orchestration with absolutely no minus-one or sequenced tracks. This time again Ilaiyaraaja is performing with his orchestra live in Chennai on Dec 28 2011, Wednesday 6 pm onwards. The venue is the same Nehru Indoor Stadium.

Get ready for the show! Tickets are priced at Rs. 500/- and Rs. 750/- per head.

Book your tickets now at http://www.jayanetwork.in/.

Here is a video of a rehearsal session. In this video, the orchestra is rehearsing the 1st interlude of 'En Iniya Pon Nilave' song from 'Moodupani' - one of my favorite songs.



Eagerly awaiting the concert!

Endrendrum Anandhame - Ilaiyaraaja

Rajiv Shankar introduced me to the song "Endrendrum Anandhame". It is a funky song by Ilaiyaraaja and is set in Sarasaangi raagam!

Listen to this song here:



Another intersting thing Rajiv pointed me out was the play in the time signature. The pallavi and rest of the song seemed to be in 3/4 except for the anupallavi - 'vaalibathin rasanai..." in 4/4. The beat seems to be similar for both portions. That is because for first 2 lines the beat plays 4 bars of 3 counts each and for the next 2 lines (vaalibathin..), it plays 3 bars of 4 count each. Very interesting to note this.

What I later noticed is that the melody (mainly charanam and 1st 2 lines of pallavi) seems to be in 6/8 time signature rather than 3/4. But the beat and bass follow 3/4 time signature. I don't know how to explain and so I added a tabla rhythm over the song to try to demonstrate that. Here is that version:

Endrendrum Anandhame by sripathyramesh

Beat   : 1 2 | 3 4 | 5 6
Melody : 1 2 3  |  4 5 6

I may be wrong too. So please correct and educate me if I am wrong. What do you think?

Jotheyali / Vizhiyile / Jaane Do Na on the Harmonium

This song, Jotheyali, was originally composed by Ilaiyaraaja for a Kannada film and that was a huge hit. This song was later reused as Vizhiyile Mani Vizhiyil in a Tamil film, Nooravudhu Naal. More recently, Ilaiyaraaja reused this again as Jaane Do Na in the Hindi film, Cheeni Kum, with a totally different arrangement.

This song has got wonderful melody and chord sequences. I wanted to try it out and so I set the basic arrangement for this song and created the Karaoke track. I then played the harmonium on top of the track and recorded it. Let me know your feedback.



Microphone used: Tascam DR-07mkII digital audio recorder

Notes: http://www.tfmpage.com/notes/ir/viz2.txt
Chords: http://indiankeyboards.11.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?p=613#613

Andhi Mazhai - our cover version

Here is a cover version of the wonderful song 'Andhi Mazhai Pozhiguradhu' from the film 'Rajapaarvai'. It was originally composed by Ilaiyaraaja.

We thought of performing this song for a band competition and that is when I started to take the notes and chords of the song and then created a karaoke track just for reference. But then for different reasons, we dropped this song. Recently I recorded the vocals for this song with my colleagues Srivatsan, Vijayalakshmi, Baranidharan and another colleague Anbu Chezhian captured it on Video. He did the editing of the video as well.

Presenting Andhi Mazhai:



Singers: Srivatsan, Vijayalakshmi, Baranidharan
Music track, Recording, Mixing: Sripathy Ramesh (Original music: Ilaiyaraaja)
Video Shot and Edited by: Anbu Chezhian

Do let us know your feedback in the comments section.

Ragas in Films

I started a new twitter account to tweet about the ragas that I notice in film songs. Not all songs are based on ragas. Infact, there are a very few songs that are composed keeping a raga in mind. So if I come across a song where the composer might have used a raga, I will tweet that. If you are on twitter, please follow @filmi_ragas.

http://twitter.com/filmi_ragas

I have also added a section titled 'Ragas in Films' in the sidebar of this blog which lists the recent tweets from the above mentioned twitter account.