The Unknown Musician

They say”,behind every successful man there is a woman”. But do you know behind every successful composer/music director/performer,there is an arranger and several other   musicians? Well,these are the guys  who  actually work as a team   and create a certain mood and ambience to the given melody. But do people really know of them? The answer is No. they remain behind the scenes.

Well,a decade ago  our Hindi film songs had lavish budgets for their recordings. Everything was recorded live, 50 violin players,30 challo players,sting section,solo instrumentalists,were all busy doing 3 to 4 shifts a day,running from 1 studio to another.
These were happy times for such musicians ,who played only for songs and the background music of films . recently, I met  a musician who had been playing only for films for several years and was chatting with him . he mentioned to me that most of these musicians who used to have so much work on their hands were totally left without work and had either moved to places like Goa, or  were playing in restaurants or bars!  These were the same bunch of talented instrumentalist who had contributed to many films and were respected soloists in  Bollywood film music.

Well, I personally feel that  the arrival of the Keyboard/synthesizer,although was a boon to the music industry , it damaged the careers of some of the film musicians badly.
The synthesizer   had  the capacity to reproduce every possible instrument at the press of a button and became the most preffered assistant of every composer and music director,
So ,for a recording you would see only the synthesizer player sitting with the composer doing the job of 50 musicians. Even the singers would walk in the next day when all the tracks were laid down and could take numerous retakes until the perfect take was achieved.  The  charm of recording live with all the musicians together with the singer was gone.

If you travel within India, especially Rajasthan you will see that almost every little family in the villages have budding singers and musicians.on one of my concert trips,when I was driving down from Jaipur to Jaisalmer I met many such familys who were trained musicians. The “Langas”,who are basically camel traders are excellent musicians and you can tell how well they are trained . Also the Khan’s and many more. These are the unknown musicians who are exceptionally talented but maybe don’t get a proper platform to showcase their talent.

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