A.R. RAHMAN: BREAKING THE RULES
Kamini Mathai
In 2009, Allah Rakha Rahman created history by becoming the first Indian musician to win an Oscar, taking home not one statuette but two for the song Jai ho and his score for Slumdog Millionaire. In his native Chennai, though, Rahman was an iconic superstar for the best part of two decades before his Oscar win, credited with ushering in a new kind of music, and a new approach to recording. This excerpt reveals some of the ways in which Rahman has changed the rules of the game, and continues to break new ground.
A.R. Rahman never lived by anyone’s rules. The first thing the Tamil industry noticed when Rahman came on the scene was that he was the antithesis of Illayaraja. He never worked the way Illayaraja or other composers in the industry did. Maybe it was just his way of working; maybe it was his way of making a point. Most people believe it was the latter—that he was making a conscious decision to break every single rule in the book about how music was to be composed for the movies in Tamil Nadu.
Ask Rahman about him changing the entire pattern of music from the way it was and he smiles: ‘You mean I’ve screwed it up?’
But seriously. ‘Everyone wanted to be Illayaraja,’ says Rahman. ‘No one ever tried to break that mould and that was what I tried doing. I started exploring other sides. There was no conscious decision to break rules.’
When he stopped playing for Illayaraja, Rahman started exploring other kinds of music—jazz, playing in bands, learning from musicians like John Antony who were more liberated than him, and listening to different kinds of music. This began to open his mind to a ‘life that existed beyond Tamil music’. As his old band buddy John Antony had once told him to do—he had finally taken his nose out of Kodambakkam.
Rahman says that when he signed on Roja, Mani Ratnam and he spoke of the ‘limited’ nature of Tamil film music, because the music was made only for a Tamil audience. They wanted to attempt a crossover, to create music that people from other parts of India too would relate to and enjoy. ‘I guess everything has to be started by somebody and then after someone else starts it everyone starts to think it is cool. I believe when you have the time and the power to do it why not do it?’
With Roja, Rahman feels he brought more melody to the industry, and better sound production. But the most important thing he brought in, he says, is talent. ‘I gave people the break they were looking for because I know how important that is in someone’s life.’
Those who began working with Rahman the composer say that he was consciously breaking every rule he was taught about the industry.
Rule number one: A tune once created can never be changed.
With Illayaraja, directors were frightened of asking for even the smallest of changes to be made. He would order them to narrate the situations for which songs were needed and that was it. In a day, the tunes would be created and handed over to them. Most often these were just what the directors were looking for, but there were times when the tunes did not meet their expectations. In both cases, however, they had no choice in the matter because by the time they had heard the tunes, Illayaraja would already be working on his next movie.
It was the same with musicians. Only those who played the notes set out in front of them without deviation survived with Illayaraja. Some musicians say if you tried to improvise even the tiniest bit he would tell you to leave the place and go join a band. When he played for Illayaraja, Dileep [later A.R. Rahman] didn’t really like this style of working. There were times that he would try to improvise, never with the tune but with some new technology, and if Illayaraja liked it he would ask him to play it. But over the years Dileep realized he didn’t want to play like that any more.
The director was only allowed to give Illayaraja the storyline and tell him what type of song he needed and who was singing it in the movie. A singer, Sreenivas, remembers that one day he went along with a director to Illayaraja and asked for a particular tune for a movie. There were to be six songs. Illayaraja told them to come back in the morning to collect the entire lot. But by the time they got home there was a call from Illayaraja’s secretary asking them to come back because the tunes were ready. And sure enough, when they returned all the tunes were in place. ‘That was the speed at which Illayaraja worked. He would have all the tunes ready and all you had to do was give it to the lyricist and get the words done and then he would arrange for the recording,’ says Sreenivas.
With both MSV and Illayaraja, there was the unwritten rule that no singer, musician or director was allowed to disagree with them. What they said was the law.
With Rahman, directors sit in the recording studio with him and inputs are asked for and changes made. Creation is a process with Rahman. It’s not just with the director, everything there is an improvisation. However, Rahman does not take too kindly to those who ask for changes to be made without knowing a thing about music.
Ask any musician who plays for Rahman, ask any singer who sings for Rahman or any engineer who works with Rahman: the song is almost never ready when they are called into the studio. The most they can hope for is a rough tune, the rest is worked on once they get there. Kabuli the guitarist says this is why many musicians did not survive with Rahman. Only those who really knew how to play could work with Rahman; the rest who were used to the Illayaraja school of music, where notes were handed out and adhered to without the slightest deviation, could never work with Rahman, he says. To people like Kabuli, who was itching to strut his stuff on the guitar for years, Rahman was a godsend. ‘He understands that he does not know every instrument as well as the person who has been playing it for years. And he does not pretend to know it either. He respects our knowledge of the instrument and knows we can do more with it if we are given a free hand,’ says Kabuli.
Over at Rahman’s, things happen as a team, it’s an open forum. Nothing is fixed. One musician recalls the incident of a tabla player who was called in to play for Taal, the Subhash Ghai movie. As he was sitting in Rahman’s studio tuning his instrument, he didn’t realize he was being watched and that every thump, duth and dith was being recorded. When he finished tuning his tabla, he gave Rahman the signal that he was through tuning and ready to play. To his surprise, Rahman signalled him back saying he was through recording too. The tabla player was paid, and returned home rather puzzled as to what had just happened. Only later did he realize his tuning was used as the interlude to a song.
It happened to one of India’s most well-known singers, Lata Mangeshkar, too. Rahman called her to sing the song ‘Jiya jale’ for the Mani Ratnam movie Dil Se (1998). As she sat in a corner of the recording room practising, Rahman recorded. And when she was ready to sing, he was ready to wrap up. There was another instance when he cracked jokes with a singer and made her laugh, not telling her that he was recording her laughter. He later cut and pasted the laughter into the song where he needed the singer’s natural laughter—he thought forcing her to laugh would have sounded unnatural and this was easier.
Rahman treats his singers like his musicians—he gives them a track and a general direction and then it is up to them to improvise. He gives them freedom too. ‘He lets them go through all their ranges and asks them to keep going until he has recorded enough for 100 songs, and then he selects from that, and edits and cuts and pastes. He takes a long time but this is a new way, this is his way,’ says Suresh Peters, who played with him in a band.
No one ever knows what Rahman is planning to do with a song, not his musicians, nor his sound engineer, his singers, or even his director. Take the song Uyire (Tu hi re in Hindi) from the movie Bombay for example. In most songs, while recording, the breathing of the singer gets recorded too and that is something that is erased from the final track. But in this case, after Sridhar ‘cleaned’ the song, Rahman asked for the ‘uncleaned’ version instead, saying he wanted that one because it gave life and breath to the song. So in the final version you can hear the singer breathing—this went perfectly with the theme of the song—since ‘uyire’ means life—and the visuals had the hero singing passionately from the ramparts of a fort.
Sreenivas, another Rahman favourite for a long time until he became a composer himself, says that what makes Rahman unique as a composer is that he looks at the overall character of a song and the characters singing it. A farmer, for instance, can’t have the perfect voice, according to Rahman. He needs something earthy.
‘Rahman always shuts himself up in a room when he composes. No one is allowed in,’ says Sreenivas. ‘He plays an inspirational loop and hums along. He thinks of a character and then he sings for forty-five minutes. Then he picks up all the bits that sound like magic to him. And he builds his song from there. Uppu karuvadu , from the Tamil movie Mudhalvan (1999), for instance, started as a slow melodious number but they had to change it to a faster rhythm to keep with the tempo of the movie. Shankar wants fast tracks; Rahman knows this, and delivers.’
‘When you are called in to Rahman’s studio,’ say musicians, ‘you don’t know whether your session is going to last a few minutes or a few hours. Sometimes he will give you something specific to play, sometimes he will just make you keep playing endlessly. You don’t know what is going to be used, what will be rejected, you just keep playing.’
Singer Tanvi Shah, who sang for Rahman for Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire—the movie for which Rahman won a Golden Globe and then two Oscars—says that during the recording of the songs, Rahman kept asking the singers to think out of the box and would not settle for anything other than the extraordinary.
‘Sometimes you have no idea what the final version sounds like until you hear the cassette and then you are like “Is that me, did I sing that?”’ says Karthik, one of Rahman’s singers. Sometimes, they say, even Rahman does not know how things are going to turn out. He is constantly making changes. There have been times when he has changed the songs even after the CD has been released, which is why in a movie for which Rahman has composed the music, sometimes the songs sound much better on screen than on your music system. Directors say that there have been times when even after the CD is released—which is usually three months before a movie—and the film is in the post-production stage, if Rahman likes the way a song has been visualized, he adds to it. Says Jyothi Krishna, who used Rahman for his debut movie Ennaku 18, Unakku 20 (2003), ‘When he saw the way I had picturized one of my songs, he just freaked out. He added more bass, more drumbeats, he turned the song around for the big screen.’
It’s a Rahman trait that scares the living daylights out of producers. They say Rahman is always adding and subtracting from his song so that no one, not even Rahman himself, can know about the final result before the CD is released. The director would have come to the studio and listened to one version, the producer would have heard something else, but until the CD is released no one knows what the songs are finally going to sound like.
Director Danny Boyle says in an interview that originally Jai ho was not the song that was being used for the dance at the end of the movie but when Rahman watched the movie, he turned to Boyle and told him he would give him another song for that scene. And then just went ahead and created Jai ho, a song that another director—Subhash Ghai—had supposedly rejected for his movie Yuvvraaj (2008).
Singer Bombay Jayashree, who has sung for MSV, Illayaraja and Rahman, describes her experience with all three: ‘MSV would sit me down with his harmonium and then patiently teach me the song, note by note. He would dictate the song line by line and then would even peep into my notebook to see that I was writing it all down correctly. He would even go to the extent of saying “write clearly ma” and “write in the next line of the book, leave a line”. He would make sure my dots and curves were in the right places too. With MSV Sir, the studio I went and met him at was like a maidan with about a hundred musicians sitting there. I couldn’t even see to the end of the hall. After I had finished practising, MSV Sir would ask me to do the take. We weren’t allowed too many live takes because it meant stopping and starting the entire orchestra.
‘With Illayaraja Sir, you had to do it absolutely right and in a given time frame. MSV Sir would give you some freedom in the sense if you did not get it exactly the way he wanted it but you were doing it well, then it was okay. With Illayaraja Sir you had to do it exactly the way he wanted it. He gets very specific, like he tells you, hold your breath here and put in the words at these points. He knows his music so well, he knows exactly how to get you to give him what he wants.
‘With Rahman, you just go there and find that sometimes even the entire tune has not yet been created. He just tells you this is the kind of melody that I want. He doesn’t even sing it to you. He sings a sort of synopsis of the song, what he wants it to sound like—and tells you to shape it up. For instance, once he asked me to sing some traditional compositions and said we can develop it like this and that. He sees what suits the singer’s voice. It was completely new for me, coming from the style of music where everything was spoon-fed to me. With Rahman, when we were recording some songs for Alaipayuthey (2000) he made me sing the raga Sindubhairavi for half an hour. He just said he was going to use it in the movie, nothing more. When I saw the film I realized he had used it for the scene where the heroine is in the hospital. Things are so free in his studio, you feel like you are jamming. Rahman gives the singer a free hand. But he is very particular about the emotion and feel you give to a song.
‘MSV’s music is pre-composed and so he tells you how to sing it. He leads the way with his harmonium. Rahman just flips in a CD and the CD plays what he wants to hear from you.
‘MSV Sir is very particular about the Tamil, it has to be well punctuated. To Illayaraja Sir it was the meaning of the words that was important, the lyrics had to get across. With Rahman sound is all important. He lets us singers sing, pronunciations are secondary. I remember for the song Narumugaye for the movie Iruvar (1997), the lyrics were in classical Tamil and I didn’t understand them. I couldn’t follow the language but Rahman said never mind, just sing it.’
Another singer, Devan, says that Illayaraja is like an architect. He builds everything and then calls the singer in to furnish the song. Rahman on the other hand, he says, moulds everything around your voice. ‘With Illayaraja it’s like singing for a teacher. With Rahman it is more the peer thing. You are in awe of Illayaraja’s library of work. I don’t even talk to him when I go see him, it is just like hello sir, vannakkam sir, and that’s it. But you can talk to Rahman. He is shy but you can have some kind of conversation. You go there, do your work, it’s cool. If he has not slept for four days, he will have swollen eyes but on the fifth day, it looks like it is just the first day. He keeps doing takes until you get it right. There is no problem with him.’
With Illayaraja, say singers, work was like school. You had to learn, then practise, and only when he thought you were ready were you allowed to go for a take. Music wasn’t recorded ‘just like that’, says a singer who doesn’t want to be quoted because she is afraid it would mean getting thrown out of the industry. Only when he felt you were ready did he come inside the console room and then you heard the track. One mistake and they had to take it from the top again. So you can imagine their surprise when with Rahman they made a mistake and he said just continue. ‘If you have done one half right then you can start from the second with Rahman. He makes you sing it over and over and then cuts and pastes all the best bits,’ says the singer.
For the newer singers who were more interested in and excited at getting a break, it didn’t matter that they were being edited and put together in parts. It was only the veterans in the industry who found it odd that they never sang a complete song for Rahman.
‘Sometimes there is not even a music track. Sometimes there is just a track and then he gives us the chord and asks us to sing. Then he adds the music. He makes just the basic tune on his keyboard. With all the other music directors I have worked for, the orchestration and background score is always ready. With Rahman, only the basic tune is ready and the notation is there. He teaches the song to us, gives the tempo on the click track and the pitch and asks us to sing,’ a popular singer says. Singers like S.P. Balasubramaniam are fond of the old way. ‘If you keep stopping and starting wherever you want you don’t get the emotion for the song. The orchestration sometimes gives a fillip to you to sing, enormous support. When you are singing alone with no orchestra and without the female voice for the duet, there is just no feeling. I feel the song becomes lifeless then,’ he says.
But there are other singers like Sreenivas who feel the Rahman way is the better way. Sreenivas has spent a lot of time with Rahman both as a singer and during the process of creation. ‘Whenever I get there only the basic tune is ready. Once you start singing, he starts playing chords and right there in front of you the song takes shape. Until now it only had form. This can go on for three to four hours if you are lucky, or longer if you are not. Finally the song is set and the tune written, and the main singer is called to sing. Rahman has a huge sound bank. He takes so much care with each song. He records each main instrument separately and then keeps adding and subtracting until he is satisfied. And you as a singer feel a part of the process and enjoy every note.’
Rule number two: You can’t work from home.
No one ever thought of building a home studio in Kollywood before Rahman. All the composers rented out studios to record their music and house their orchestra. Before Rahman … the orchestra was set, the musicians were made to practise, the singers were asked to practise their singing and the whole song was recorded from start to finish at one sitting. Everyone knew what they were playing and there was not a note out of place.
It was Rahman who figured out that if he built his own studio, in the long run, it would make him more money. Also, he never composed like the rest of the music directors—summoning 100 odd musicians and recording a piece from start to finish. He preferred calling the musicians in one by one, spending hours recording with each of them and then piecing his compositions together. With Rahman, everyone is called in at different times to do their stuff and then paid. For instance, first the drummer is called, then the flautist, then the guitarist and so on. At the end of it the singer is called, or sometimes it can be the other way round.
Some say Rahman started composing like this out of necessity. As per Chennai’s musicians’ union rules, you cannot call an orchestra in after 10 p.m. But since Rahman worked only after 10 p.m., he had to stop calling them in as an orchestra and had to just call them in one by one. So while the rest of the industry worked in the day, Rahman slept. And when they called it a day, Rahman would set about composing.
Singers and musicians say that with Illayaraja and the large studio system you had to be punctual. You started on time, you packed up on time. Illayaraja never mingled with his musicians or his singers. He would come to the studio, record and leave.
Rahman’s recording studio, on the other hand, is like a home. You have a place to sit and relax, there is a television that you can switch on, you can ask for tea, you can chat with friends. ‘You never feel like you have been waiting long,’ says Febi Mani, who sings chorus for Rahman. ‘You see musicians coming in and going out. You really enjoy it. Sometimes he calls you in at 10 p.m., sometimes even 2 a.m., but you don’t notice. Everyone is waiting anyway. And we always get a drop back.’
Like Kalyan, the violinist, jokes, ‘By the time you finish recording with Rahman, it’s daybreak and you tell yourself, you might as well buy milk and go home.’
Rahman began working at night because that is when he was used to composing during the ad jingle days. During the days, he played sessions. With Roja, he composed the music at night because he worked on his jingles for the better part of the day. Slowly, the jingles reduced to a trickle while Rahman found he had a flood of movies to handle. So he just made that transition of working, undisturbed, on his movies through the nights and sleeping through most of the day.
His decision to work out of a home studio did not arise from his wanting to be a trendsetter. He thought in terms of overheads, which would have been outstanding if he chose to rent out a studio, which is generally hired on an hourly basis. ‘I did a lot of things because they were convenient. I started working out of a studio because there were a lot of inhibitions that I had. People thought it was my style and started building their own studios. Now I have almost gone back to the old ways of doing things … like for Warriors of Heaven and Earth I worked with a full orchestra. I had my own privacy and could work at leisure in the studio,’ says Rahman.
But the fact was that he did start a trend. Today, even Illayaraja’s sons compose out of little studios in their homes. The need for a full-blown orchestra is no longer there.
Thanks to Rahman’s home studio, musicians no longer have to run after composers, says Kabuli. ‘You can sit at home and wait for the call because if Rahman needs you he calls you directly. There are no middlemen. Yes, the competition is great, because you get called only if you are the best, but I think it’s worth it to get the go-betweens out. It is exciting and scary. But there are many music directors and so there are more chances out there for everyone,’ says Kabuli.
But the downside to this new Rahman trend is that only the best are called upon all the time. The other 100-odd players of a given instrument find themselves left out unless a huge orchestra is called for. This is a huge change for many musicians.
Rule number three: The Tamil language is central to a song.
Both MSV and Illayaraja believed lyrics were all-important in a song and the two of them were very particular about pronunciation and enunciation. MSV would go to the extent of making a singer sit in front of him and his harmonium practising until their Tamil was exact—so that they didn’t get their ‘la’s and ‘zha’s mixed— making sure every nuance in the lyrics was brought out. Singers had no choice with these two composers; they had to pick up Tamil and they had to get it right. They almost never used singers from the North for their songs. MSV and Illayaraja didn’t care if it meant they had to practise for hours. The whole arrangement was very guru–shishya like and introduced a feeling of awe. It made the singers feel they were in the presence of a real master, who taught while they listened and obeyed. Then they went home and did their homework, practising until the appointed day and hour when they were summoned to sing.
Some singers in the South did not like the fact that lyrics were taking a backseat in Rahman’s quest for different voices. ‘Udit Narayan, for instance, is a Hindi speaker trying to sing a Tamil song. The first time he sang here no one could understand what he was saying. Rahman started using them and now it has become a habit, and this saddens me. I believe that in the lyrics lie the heart of a song. Music goes through the words to a common man. Experiment by all means but with singers who speak the language,’ says S.P. Balasubramaniam, one of those not too pleased with the trend.
Vairamuthu the lyricist has the same problem. ‘No one bothers about good Tamil any more,’ he says. ‘Anyone can sing. They bring in singers from Bombay. They are encouraging people from other languages to sing and that is not right, because they cannot pronounce the words correctly.’
While some lyricists said this ‘Bombay Tamil’ was ruining the essence of Tamil film music—Tamilians are very protective of the sanctity of their language—Rahman refused to believe so. He was clearly interested more in the tunes and the sounds than in the actual lyrics. So it didn’t matter to him that the Pakistan born Adnan Sami couldn’t for the life of him roll his ‘l’s to sound like ‘zha’s or that pop singer Lucky Ali would just mumble though the complicated words, but it did make Vairamuthu tear his hair out. In fact, during the release of Kandukondein Kandukondein in 2000, this blew up into a controversy. At a press conference to launch the music for the movie, Vairamuthu said he hoped Rahman would let people listen to the lyrics of his song and this annoyed Rahman so much so that the next day when Vairamuthu went to Rahman’s studio he was not allowed in. Both pretend there is nothing amiss though.
But Rahman believes in novelty, in change, in breaking out of the routine. Whenever he is asked this question—and it happens in almost every interview—he has the same answer in the form of a rhetorical question: Why must every actor sound like S.P. Balasubramaniam? Or every actress like Lata Mangeshkar? If the actors can be changed with every movie, why not the singers?
But Rahman is also known to have given a break to numerous singers. And even today when you want to speak to them about ‘their’ Rahman, they won’t open up. Rahman has their loyalty. Ask them anything about him and they say, ‘Sorry, we have been told we cannot discuss the way Rahman works. That is it.’
Among the singers he introduced are Suresh Peters; Shahul Hameed, who was more a friend than a singer, used extensively until his death in a car accident; Harini; Minminee; Mahalaxmi Iyer, who has become a pop star; Sreenivas, a chemical-dye engineer who left his job to become a playback singer because Rahman thought he had it in him, joining the chorus until Rahman made him graduate to solos; Unnikrishnan; Aslam Mustafa and Nityashree.
Rahman found his singers in the strangest of places under the strangest of circumstances. In 1995, Rahman was a judge at a singing competition at his former school Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan and promised to give the winner a chance to sing in one of his movies. Harini won, and the next thing she knew was she was singing ‘Nila kaigaridhu’ in the movie Indira and later ‘Telephone manipol’ in Indian. ‘I know the difficulty of not being given the chance to prove yourself when you are talented,’ says Rahman, who believes he must provide an opportunity for talented people.
But more practically, the voices are for variety. Rahman says that the attention span of the viewer has decreased and as a result you needed to use different voices even if it is for the same character. People are not always watching the movie when they are listening to the soundtrack, so you have to account for that and make the music different. ‘It’s not as if they believe the actor is really singing anyway. They want different voices. They want change too,’ says Rahman.
Rahman’s experiments sometimes did wonders for singers’ careers. For Rangeela (1995), Rahman resurrected Asha Bhonsle, who hadn’t sung in some time. Rahman explains that he wasn’t doing any favours—he picked Bhonsle because the leading lady, Urmila Matondkar, was new and needed a fresh, glamorous and sensual voice. He got her to sing the title song Rangeela re. After that Asha got him to let her have a go at Tanha tanha, which went on to become the best, the most sung and most memorable song in the film.
Rangeela [became] the best Hindi debut director Ram Gopal Varma could have asked for, the best Bollywood debut Rahman could have asked for and the best reincarnation for Asha Bhonsle, who went on to make the most of her second chance, recording for blockbusters, bringing out albums, singing with international stars and in effect becoming one of the busiest playback singers in Bollywood again.
It was just luck or destiny that Rahman’s first Bollywood release was Rangeela. At the time, he was working on Drohkaal for Govind Nihalani. He was introduced by Mani Ratnam to Ram Gopal Varma, who told Rahman that he wanted to do a modern musical. Rahman was not new to the Hindi film industry because many of his songs had now been dubbed in Hindi, but he was never comfortable with this trend and always wanted his music to reach all of India in the original. Here was a chance to prove himself to Bollywood and, in essence, the rest of India.
Ram Gopal Varma did a smart thing. He whisked Rahman off to Goa, far from the phone calls and prying eyes of other directors constantly lining up outside his studio to grab him for their movies. Varma also transported Mehboob, the lyricist, so he could work with them undisturbed. This was actually the beginning of a new trend. Nowadays many directors take Rahman as far away from Chennai as they can and then compose with him. M.F. Husain sent Rahman to Prague, Kathir took Rahman to Bangalore, K.S. Ravikumar took him to Kerala, Mani Ratnam to Fisherman’s Cove, Rajiv Menon to London. But most of the directors have given up doing this now because they found it often doesn’t work. Menon found that Rahman preferred watching TV for the three to four days that he was in London, and Kathir says that in Bangalore Rahman and his family just went from dargah to dargah—of course Rahman felt so guilty afterwards that he offered to foot the bill for the entire trip.
Rule number four: You don’t need to give musicians credits for a song.
With Illayaraja and MSV or before their time, none of the musicians who worked on a song was credited for it. Only the music director was mentioned. With Rahman, everyone from the cymbalist to the editor to the chorus singer to his assistant was credited on the CD. Like one singer says, even if all you did was go ‘lalala’, you can be sure your name would appear on the CD. Sometimes you might sing a bit for one song in some movie and find that it was not used. Months later, just like in the case of musicians, you might be listening to the music of another movie and find your bit inserted. Check the jacket of the CD and you’ll find yourself credited, though you never actually sang for this particular movie.
With Illayaraja, since he invariably used an orchestra that was at least 100-strong, musicians were never credited for the songs. Only those within the industry knew who his main musicians were; they remained faceless and nameless to the world outside.
Rahman changed all that.
Sivamani has always thanked his ‘bro’ A.R. Rahman for bringing him to the limelight. He says he was a ‘silent’ drummer in the background until Rahman brought him to the fore. Now there’s just no stopping him.
Bombay Jayashree says that usually when a song was sung only the soloists were credited and maybe the person who wrote the lyrics, but the people who did the humming were never mentioned. Says Febi Mani, ‘With Rahman, all that changed. Now people recognize my work.’
Perhaps Rahman purposely broke these rules to prove a point, or perhaps he did it out of necessity. But whatever the reason, Rahman had broken the rules. He also knew that one of the only ways to make people sit up and take note was to create a completely new genre of music. Whether it was using his skills as a keyboard player, his knowledge of computer software or using new singers, he just had to try it all because this was his one chance. So he did everything he could to arrive.
Perhaps this was because Rahman felt his father never got his due and neither did he, when he was playing for and ghostcomposing for directors. Says Kalyan, the violinist, ‘I know that Sekhar was never credited for the work he did and that is why people outside the industry never heard of him. While the music directors would compose the melodies, it was Sekhar who would put in all the background music and arrange everything for it and then the music director would come and okay it and then they would go for the take. He was the assistant but that was all he was. He was never credited.’ Rahman always knew this—that his father had ghost-composed for several music directors without ever sharing in their limelight—and this was his way of righting that wrong. With Rahman, people started recognizing the names of the flautist and the violinist, of the harmony singers, of the programmer, of the drummer. They knew that Swamidurai was Rahman’s assistant, Sivamani had played the drums, and Febi Mani had sung a tune. They even knew the names of the people who assisted the assistants. Other music composers started to do this after Rahman started the trend.
All the faceless, nameless people who had been playing for Illayaraja and others for ages without credit were suddenly getting famous in their own right. Some reason that Illayaraja could not put the names of all his musicians down as his orchestra was large; others say he never wanted to. But Rahman made this possible. Today, owing to his busy schedule and numerous projects, Rahman has a team working on each of his projects handling various aspects of it. But he invariably puts the final pieces together himself to create his tune.
New voices have become a trademark with Rahman. Singers who had been waiting for years to be heard and those just entering the market crowd his studio and home waiting for their break. Word has spread that this is the one place to get it. People call him one of the best talent scouts in the industry. Rahman says he likes to give people a chance because he believes he got where he is because he himself was given a chance.
With Rahman, a song is all about tracks and layers, adding and subtracting till he gets to the right sound. There is no formula. Perhaps that is why he sticks with the newcomers—in terms of singers as well as lyricists—because he can mould them, make them keep reworking every tune until he is satisfied. He knows there is no way he can do that with veterans. Newcomers are willing to do it as long as they get their break.
‘Rahman is what you would call a trial-and-error-method composer,’ says Johnson, another composer. ‘He never lets go of a song until he is satisfied.’
The older singers say he is quiet, the younger singers say he is not, it’s just that he is more comfortable with the younger lot. And the older ones are slowly being eased out unless absolutely required for a song. For instance, Janaki, a veteran in the field— she has sung for MSV, Illayaraja and Rahman—does not work at night. So Rahman would call her in the evenings and mornings and sometimes she says he would not even be there when she sang. Only Rahman’s conductor would be there waiting for her. Rahman would be sleeping and would step in only for the mixing and dubbing. ‘What would happen is that his manager would call me and then there would be one rehearsal. Rahman would sing the track to a track singer and then listen to the song with my voice and then would keep adding the instruments to it. There was never any orchestra when I went there,’ says Janaki. ‘That was the difference between him and Illayaraja and MSV. With them there was always a full orchestra present. We could see each other. We would work together, sing together and the emotion would be there in the voice because of the general feeling present.’ Janaki says that with Rahman you are almost always singing alone. ‘I have sung duets for him, where I didn’t even know who the male singer was going to be. I have just sung my part and left. Only when I hear it on the cassette do I know who he picked for the male parts,’ says Janaki, describing a method that was virtually unheard of earlier.
‘For Rahman the sound is the ultimate,’ says Thumba Raja. ‘He says when people listen to the cassette they must be able to feel the sound in front of them and around them. So he makes you stand here and there, by the wall, no a little farther back, take two steps forward, perfect, adjust the mike … anything to get the sound just right.’
The other reason, say people in the industry, for Rahman sticking to new singers is that he prefers to compose at night, and he can get the newer finds to agree to these hours. Most of the older lot just couldn’t do the night shifts and the long hours of singing in different ways, with many takes and retakes. They are more used to the structured functioning of the Illayaraja world where every note and word was in place before the word go.
It was not just with different music that Rahman would experiment. He would mix and match words from different languages, create words that did not exist, there was simply no limit to what he would do.
Ultimately this whole Rahman concept of trying out different voices unknowingly sparked a trend in the Tamil film industry. Rahman had opened up the road to a sea of talent. Those who work with him say he is never on the lookout for the perfect voice, he just wants a voice that works for him.
Dheena Chandradas, who was with Rahman during his band days and then sang for him later on, says that there was this one time the two of them were sitting in his studio when these three girls came up to him and said they wanted to sing. Rahman didn’t turn them away. He recorded a chorus with them but they were really ‘lousy’, according to Dheena. Once they left the studio he called his sisters—who have sung on a number of occasions for him—and re-recorded the chorus. He never said a word to anyone. He also never called those girls back. But they were happy.
Today, thanks to Rahman, new singers are being discovered every other day. Veterans such as S.P. Balasubramaniam, though, don’t seem pleased with the way things are going: ‘With reverence I say that sometimes he goes overboard when he imports the likes of Adnan Sami to sing. What is he going to do tomorrow? Tomorrow he might bring in a Chinese singer too to sing a Tamil number. These things confuse me. I know he spends a lot of time on them but personally you know you can’t make out whatever they are saying.’
Rahman says that he uses different voices because the songs demand it. ‘I use new voices because this generation wants variety.’
Extracted from A.R. Rahman: The Musical Storm.