check this site: http://asiarecipe.com/inddance.html

“Kamal Hassan proved to all those parents who are afraid of their sons joining in dance studios that male version of classical dance is glamorous, masculine, tasteful and elegant. Even though he was trained in Bharata Natyam, in this film Kamal Hassan performs many other styles also.”

and also these videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6VCxXno848 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r17Fq3m_Jk

its my humble retort that Kamal hassan is much MUCH more than just someone who duped an entire state with just three dance moves!

Ilayaraja was very innovative in many ways, but what he didn’t meddle around too much with was the structure of a song. Now, if you are familiar with forms in western music (like sonata, rondo etc), most of Indian film songs probably fall into the rondo form – they keep coming back to the a ‘subject’ which is the opening vocal melodic phrase. So a typical song is structured like: X1 A A* A X2 B B* A AA X3 B B A A* A ; Looks complicated, but it’s really not. X1 is usually a purely instrumental overture, A is the main subject, A* is closely related to A, X2 is a purely instrumental bridge to B B; then repeat A A A, X3 is a purely instrumental bridge to a repeat of B B* etc. Most film songs (or for that matter most songs of any kind) are like miniature western classical ‘movements’

By and large Ilayaraja stuck to this, but where he let his imagination roam free was in the instrumental passages and how he transitioned between the various melodic material (basically, the chord and key changes; now I am not good at recognizing chords and keys, but I can tell the changes, and I think I can spot imaginative progressions). The weird thing about Ilayaraja’s progressions (at least for me) is that they are both unpredictable and very smooth. So he is kind of like Mozart in this, I suppose – not messing with form too much, but being so imaginative in melodic transitions.

Instrumentation was Ilayaraja’s other big strength. There have been others who have been great melody makers (almost any successful film music director, for in India melody is the king in making a song a hit) and others who have been great sculptors of sound (A. R. Rahman and his later clones), but in my humble opinion, no one else made such amazing orchestral arrangements. His specialty was the ability to use a wide array of instruments and engage them in a lively conversation. His orchestration often has lively ‘call and answer’ parts – like in ‘solla solla enna perumai’, in the second instrumental passage (X3) there is an amazing duet between Sax and rhythms+guitar. Or in this song ‘Andhi mazhai’ there’s a great piano – mridangam duet, again in X3 (mridangam is the south indian drum).
If he used both western and indian drums, their beat would fall on different counts in a cycle (like in this song: Poongathave http://youtube.com/watch?v=-0HJvBjUn5g)

In terms of songs, I think this ability for orchestration has been the hardest for other composers to imitate (no one excepted). To be fair Ilayaraja has found it hard to deliver some sounds too (Rahman’s song always seem to have better produced sound, and Ilayaraja has never given a convincing song with a techno/hiphop influenced sound like Rahman has been able to).

In my opinion, there has been one and only one other movie by any other composer that has come close to Ilayaraja’s style in terms of both melody and orchestration (this is for Tamil music geeks) – and that is Devendran’s ‘Vedham Pudhithu’.

to follow up on my earlier post, here are two more songs with an 80s feel to them. Also please please don’t watch the videos they are mostly horrible (the two songs you referred to are exceptions)

1. http://youtube.com/watch?v=y_r_M7O0P1s (Muthhaaduthe Muthhaduthe); Now the same movie has other songs with completely different sounds – the reason Ilayaraja went for a ‘contemporary’ (for that era, early eighties) sound for this song is that (I am guessing) the guy and girl dancing in this song are the young adolescent son and daughter of two older characters who are the main characters. In fact the girl in this song has a father who is the hero of the movie. The hero has his own duet with his love interest, and that song has a totally different sound and feel. It is here, if you are interested: http://youtube.com/watch?v=cp8BgrRjlQo – so the young ones’ song has a light airy feel, whereas the older couples’ song has some added depth (I think the minor key does the trick).

2, http://youtube.com/watch?v=6robs2bJrn8 (Mella Mella ennai thottu) – You can imagine this is the Tamil equivalent of Erci Prydz’s “Call on meeeeee” (http://youtube.com/watch?v=K-2iwGeZ2O4) I mean, musically they are very different, but they are both hormonal; what is achieved with an abundance of pelvic thrusts in ‘call on me’, Ilayaraja is trying to do with his music (and he has to overcome the horrible video) This song in fact is really different from anything else that Ilayaraaja did that I am tempted to thing he got the tune from elsewhere.

hey, I am a tamil speaker and a big fan of Ilayaraaja – and I have listened to hundreds of his songs hundreds of times. But even I was taken aback by ‘Solla Solla”s originality. so the bottom line is, I am not sure he ever composed more than a handful of songs in the style of ‘solla solla’ or ‘ilamai itho itho’. (

The thing is unlike western musicians he doesn’t go for a particular sound; he rather goes for a particular mood (or ‘situation’ in bolly/kollywood parlance) that’s in tune with what goes on in the movie. And so he does his best work when challenged with interesting situations. But unfortunately he happens to be far more original than Indian movies, so he ended up getting mostly stock situations (like guy and a girl dancing) and he managed to to astoundingly original and prolific (close to 4000 songs) work within the constraints of formulaic indian movies.

I think it’s possible to go through his output and come up with a dozen or so different ‘sounds’ and dozens of albums in each of those sounds, but that’s not the point of his music.

But anyway, if you want more overtly western influenced songs you should check out these:

(this was pointed out also by Manoj @35), kind of twist-ey 1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9tjTDyXSZA. (ram bam bam) Listen to this on headphones and listen to the trumpets, piano, guitar and the bass

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNaBmArxeeI (ninnu kori varnam) This is not really rock or any other genre you can point to. But this is a really cool interpretation of a really traditional south indian composition. Prominent drums, synthesizer sounds.

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzgaCmcw9Ss (vaa vaa pakkam vaa) This is again no obvious genre – but it has overt west influence – great chorus, some really bizzarre very low sounding wind instrument (I don’t know what it is), drums… but the video lacks the humor of ‘solla solla’.

3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzgaCmcw9Ss (po malarndhida) This is an overt carnatic (south indian classical) – western fusion piece. The reason I say overt is that most of Ilayaraja’s songs can be construed as east-west fusion, but they don’t sound like crappy self-conscious mish mashes a lot of other musicians’ fusion attempts tend to be, and sound really natural. But this piece is one example of a happy overtly fusion piece that Ilayaraja did. Prominent ‘mridangam’ – the south indian classical drum, and wierd strings that are in keeping with the somewhat humorous nature of the situation.

4. To round this list off, I will give you two good songs Ilayaraaja came up with for a totally stock boy-girl dance. You can probably call these fusion too. a. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu5iUZa9OJY (pattu kannam thottu kolla) – the highlight of this song are the first 50 seconds or so where he comes up with a great section for multiple rhythm and vocal lines. (he is a big fan of Bach) b. This is a really standard Ilayaraja piece, but still very enjoyable: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSOpAa-lKkI (ABC nee vaasi) There’s a slight nod to a suite from Bizet’s Carmen. Ilayaraaja starts his voice melody with the ding-dong-ding bells melody of the Bizet song, (ding-dong-ding ding-dong-ding = A-B-C nee vaa si) but outrageously enough, Ilayaraaja ‘resolves’ the opening phrase with the the phrase that Bizet used to open his song – pay attention to the “sooo easy” phrase.

• clueless white boy

Here’s the shortened URL for a forum where they have a list of songs plagiarized from other languages mostly Tamil/Ilayaraja by Anand Milind; Very interesting:

http://ilayaraja.notlong.com

Enjoy. The most notable lift is Dhak Dhak.

I think there’s a reason why many Tamilians take offence when Ilayaraja’s work is criticized, as we believe he has reached a level where he has no equals and many of us grew up listening to his masterpieces.

Here’s a favorite of many and mine. The interesting thing about this clip is, at about 2:04, you’ll see a young Ilayaraja, lip synching for a song that was actually sung by S.P.Balasubramaniam which is an interesting twist. You’ll also notice he is a bit camera-shy as always. Tamil speakers might appreciate this remixed version of the same song, which in my opinion, was done without destroying the original.

The song’s meaning literally is “say say what pride”, but the context is, “If you keep talking about yourself, who’s gonna give a shit after a while?”

The freaky guy in the gray business suit is a villian, the guy in the darker suit butt dancing towards the end is his henchman, and our dancer/hero has infiltrated them by wearing a disguise. (somehow I think the disguise consisted of him trimming the afro)

So in a small way, the dance sequence actually makes narrative sense in the story line – which is a rarity for these types of films.

I’ll let the real film snobs debate relevance and symbolism of Snow White in the background.