Music Directors

I am a fan of old Hindi and Tamil movie songs as i have mentioned in earlier posts (http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2010/12/old-indian-movies-songs-and-actors.html).

I always used to wonder why there rarely were any Muslim or women music directors. There were a few muslim MD's: Naushad, Iqbal Quereshi, Khurshid Anwar, Khayyam, Sajjad Hussein, Sardar Malik, Ghulam Mohammad etc but not as many as Muslim actresses.

And when it comes to women MD's I know of only one: Usha Khanna. I loved her music in Dil Deke Dekho. All the songs are extremely melodious. She is as good as any other music director. But apart from her there has been no other female MD I can think of. I have heard of a MD called Saraswati Devi way back when. Why has this been so? Maybe creativity (music) and rendering (singing) someone else's stuff are different skills and some people can create while others can only render (sing) what someone else created.

Coming to the MD's, I did an analysis of their output - the songs they created for Hindi and Tamil movies in 1950's and 60's (and rare instances in 70's).

After about 8 years working on my music collection I now have categorized 9000+ songs with the average release year of the songs being 1963.  

Notes on my collection and the grades:

• Of the 9000+ songs, I could not locate the video (nor audio) for about 600 odd songs which are hence yet to be categorized. Of the balance 8500 odd songs, I have about 2800+ which I consider to be good. Initially I had a qualitative grading of each of the songs. Subsequently I gave numerical weights to the letters or grades as shown below. A good song refers to a grade assigned of G or above (above meaning Y or Y_).

• Rating for each song:

I rated each song from A (lowest) to Y_ (highest) as shown below.

Grade             Numerical Grade 

A:                      0

S:                      1

N:                      2 

G:                      4 

Y:                       8

Y_:                   16

• How I rated each song: Ones I dreaded hearing a minute into the song were rated A = Awful. In the last month (Jun 2017), I deleted more than 1000 songs which I felt were not good enough, being too new (1980s or later) and too awful - these would have been rated A's had I retained them. The song that I could just about tolerate, like a distant opinionated aunt whom one puts up with because she brings a lot of gossip, were rated S = So-So. Those songs that I thought I might want to hear again were rated N = Not Bad. G = Good were those songs which I would definitely want to hear again soon, maybe tomorrow. Y = Yes were those songs that that give me goose pimples and I would want to hear repeatedly. Y_ = Yesssss were those songs that make me forget all the sorrows in the world. Incidentally isn't this the way we grade anything subjective? Like relationships or ice-creams or vacation places? Would we go back for more is the acid test for goodness (after taking into account that there are no adverse side effects by going back for more).

• I do not claim that I was perfectly neutral to all (Hindi and Tamil) movie songs of all genres and all periods. I had a bias for the movie songs of 50s and 60s and hence I tended to choose those songs more than songs of other decades. On the rare occasions when I hear a song from 1990s or 2010's which is very good, I would add it to my collection. I was neutral enough that I made some surprising discoveries which I mention towards the end of this post.

• The ratings may not be universal meaning that the rating I gave a song may be different from the rating you give. That's all right. This is about my song collection and my ratings of the songs and hence of the MD's. 

• The ranking of MD's is based on my grading of their songs. And I may not have considered many of their songs in my collection - this could have affected the grading. The number of songs of Viswanathan Ramamurthy (in Tamil) or Shankar Jaikishan (in Hindi) in my collection would be much much more than Sardar Malik's or Sajjad Hussein's or Ghantasala's. Songs not in my collection could be a pure mistake on my part - that I just missed having them in my collection. Or it could be a deliberate action of having had them removed because they were too awful. Had I retained them the grade for the MDs concerned would have dropped from their current levels.

• I set the grade values to jump in geometric progression (GP) instead of in arithmetic progression (AP). It was my belief that each grade change required a substantial higher quality in music and I thought GP was more apt.

• How consistent was I in assigning the grades? Over a period of time when I hear a song again, the new rating may movie up or down a notch about 30-40% of the time. Very very rarely would the rating change by 2 or more notches. This issue of grade moving up or down one notch is to do with human subjectivity. I am only human! More on this subject here: http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2017/07/tu-mere-saamne.html

• How did I identify the songs in my collection? The first song in my collection was Aadha Hai Chandrama from Navrang. A friend of mine suggested this song. And then it led to more songs. I already had been interested in songs for more than 35 years. Whenever I came across a nice (typically old) song on TV or radio or on youtube or anywhere that wasn't in my collection, I would add the song to my collection. And well like any financial consultant would tell you, there is this power of compounding. And before I realized it I was sitting on a huge fortune (of songs). After addition of the song came grading - and deletion where necessary. Once the framework for grading was in place the reports came automatically.

I could now do a weighted average of song quality by year, by music director, by movie (even by actor or actress). And sure I did all this. Surprisingly I do not yet have reports by singer! 

Obviously this led to the next steps:

1. Finding the years in which the song quality was the highest. What else would I find. It was 1957-1968. Because I was biased towards songs of 1950s and 60s, this finding is quite expected.
2. I could find movies having high quality music which had a minimum of 4 (or if you wanted - 2 or 6 or any other number) songs. 
3. I identified music directors whose overall grade was high. And here I found some really interesting stuff.
1. Couple of Muslim MD's names came up high in ranking. Sajjad Hussein and Sardar Malik. I never expected them to score high. Of course the number of their songs in my collection is small unlike those of more established or well known MD's.
2. In Tamil I had thought of Viswanathan Ramamurthy (VR), KV Mahadevan (KVM) and G Ramanathan (GR) as the great ones. Some consider Ilaiyaraja (IR) as great. In my weighted scores, VR scored way above the rest, IR and KVM were distant 2nd and 3rd (so also MSV without Krishnamurthy, TG Lingappa) while GR was lagging way behind along with SN (Subbaiah Naidu). In all fairness GR was an MD of the 1940s and 50s. Music of the independence era was different and needs a different ear to appreciate. Even in Hindi, I do not like Naushad's songs of the independence era. I guess the issue of GR was more due to the era. Incidentally, GR's songs in Uththama Puththiran were very good.
3. In Hindi the best ones were Salil Chowdhury, OP Nayyar (OPN), Shankar Jaikishan (SJ), Sardar Malik at the very top followed by Naushad, SD Burman, Ravi, Madan Mohan (MM), Sajjad Hussein, RD Burman, Hemant Kumar. 
4. Song quality of some music directors (MD's) varied by periods. Shankar Jaikushan's music in the 1970's wasn't very good. Ravi's music in early 1960s was great. Naushad seemed to hit a high between 1963 and 1968 though he was in the field since the 1940's. VR stayed together from early 1950s till 1965, but their best music was in the 1960s. Half of RD Burman's best songs was in the 5 year period between 1970 and 1975. Same is true for Laxmikant Pyarelal's (LP). Though both RD and LP were there in the field over 20 years. During the same period 1970-75, SD Burman had produced only 20% of his best songs. See the difference?
4. Finally, the grade I gave to a song is consistent across language (Tamil and Hindi film songs comprise more than 90% of my collection). The grade does not depend on whether Rafi sang it or it has good guitar or a nice dance sequence etc meaning I tried to not be biased to any MD or singer. The grade depended only on how I found the music and the voices of the artistes. Lyrics had no part to play in the grade I assign to a song. Women pls note: No matter how many times the words Ghum, Jasbaat, Dhadkan, Kaadhal (in Tamil), Manam, Themmaangu etc occur in the song -  it would have no effect on the grade. Kannadasan and Sahir Ludhyanvi are wasted on me. 

Additional reading:

• http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2010/02/my-music.html (there are some interesting links in this post)