TERE BAGHAIR ZINDAGI DARD BAN KE REH GAYEE: "They (S-J & Rafi) played a very crucial part in making my place which was very tough with all the competition from the giants around me"

Friday, June 27, 2008

"They (S-J & Rafi) played a very crucial part in making my place which was very tough with all the competition from the giants around me"

Q-Don't you think your image as a path-breaking dancer-actor was helped by great music Shankar-Jaikishan and sons sung by Mohammed Rafi who knew exactly suited your new image?

Shammi Kapoor- "Of course, they did. They played a very crucial part in making my place which was very tough with all the competition from the giants around me. They created music that went with my image, songs that are immortal, not classic songs but songs that celebrated life. I will always be grateful to them. God bless their good souls". (Photo:Courtesy:mohdrafi.com)

Full text of an interview with Shammi Kapoor at http://in.movies.yahoo.com/interview-detail/146/13718/The-Spirit-Is-Always-So-Young.html

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Comments from visitors to this Blog which pertains to SJ/blog

Jay has left a new comment on your post "Revised List of SJ Films":

On listening to Pritam's tracks of today ['Metro', 'Jannat', 'Dhoom - 2', 'Jab We Met' and so on] one cannot fail to notice the composer's penchant for the hitting the higher notes with progressive rapidity. Without casting aspersions on the composer's talent, I must say that most of his tracks are a tad jarring to the ears with their techno-beats always rising to a crescendo but at the end of the day, his music spells success in today's hybrid music culture.
This takes me back to the last years of S-J as a team, the '70-'71 phase, when their music was being taken apart by the critics. It, of course, didn't really make a dent to their popularity, for die-hard admirers like us enjoyed whatever they came up with – good, bad or indifferent. Perhaps because we were led by our personal pre-possessions with regard to the 'S-J brand' that had an endearing quality to it. Raju Bharatan and his wife Girija Rajendran, who used to write regularly for 'Filmfare', were both critical of their works and used to compare it unfavourably with their earlier scores. Raju of course, never missed an opportunity to take pot shots at S-J whenever the opportunity arose.
But the lady who took the cake was Pushpa Hans at 'Star & Style' who too wrote a regular column on music every week for the publication and towards the end, launched frequent diatribes at S-J. Even as you read her pieces you couldn't but sneer at her irrationality of analysis. For example, while describing the music of 'Sapnon Ka Saudagar', she identified Sharda's 'Maar doongi chakkoo…' as the song that stood out among the rest. Touche!!! Then she ran down the tracks of 'Brahmachari', 'Jhuk Gaya Aasman' and 'Shikaar' [which were all released in March-April '68] describing them as offering 'mediocre fare' without coming up with tangible reasons for doing so. And a shocker was her description of 'Main gaaun tum so jao…' as 'crude and ineffective' – a track that still gives me the goose-bumps and one that has stood the test of time as one of our perennial lullabies. Just a month before Jaikishan's death she wrote an extremely scathing piece on S-J and for the first time perhaps, brought their conflict out in the open. I remember she wrote something like - ‘Their disharmony has deprived music lovers of some wonderful music; perhaps they drew inspiration from each other when working together’. Brave words these, especially when to my reckoning, no one openly wrote about S-J's split in those days, if ever there was one. The last S-J film that she covered was, if I remember, ‘Duniya Kya Jaane’, ironically one of their weakest scores ever and described the songs as ‘painful necessities composed out of the duo’s juke box of ten years ago’. Well, the film and its songs barely registered so it gave enough wherewithal to the lady to stoke the red embers.
If Ms. Pushpa Hans is still associated with music, I wonder if she would come up with a similar twiddle-twaddle regarding the style and form of Pritam's tracks that only seems to circum-ambulate the 6th and 7th notes, compared to which, S-J's music even in those last years together sounds so lively & pulsating. Scornfulness of thought often stirreth laughter than anything else!!!

Jay SubramanyamLucknow

Friday, June 27, 2008

"They (S-J & Rafi) played a very crucial part in making my place which was very tough with all the competition from the giants around me"

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