The Chicago Tribune
Kronos Quartet CD pays tribute to Bollywood Features industry's Bhosle, Burman
By Ernesto Lechner Special to the Tribune Published September 25, 2005
The songs grab your attention with their mind-boggling combination of styles: Latin big band and European cabaret; syrupy Hollywood strings and feisty rock 'n' roll; wistful religious hymns and lilting reggae beats. Add the mystically tinged strains of traditional tabla and sitar, and you get an extreme combination of the cheesy and the sublime.
It's the sound of Bollywood, the Indian movie industry in which musical interludes are an integral and unavoidable part of the film experience, because they can be understood by all in a nation divided by more than 200 dialects. Marked by the unusually high-pitched voice of its female vocalists, Bollywood songs are not performed by the actors, but rather by so-called playback singers who since the 1940s have been achieving the kind of celebrity status enjoyed by pop stars in the Western world.
Bollywood kitsch is at the core of the latest album by classical music's Kronos Quartet. Called "You've Stolen My Heart," the collection focuses on singer Asha Bhosle and her former husband, the late musical director R.D. Burman. Bhosle is the world's most recorded vocalist, with at least 13,000 songs to her credit. Burman was the most brilliant composer and arranger Bollywood has known, and Kronos pays tribute to both by selecting 12 of Burman's tracks and inviting Bhosle, now in her early 70s, to record them again.
"About 15 years ago, I started listening to Bollywood soundtracks," says Kronos violinist David Harrington, who produced the album. "I soon realized that the songs I liked the best were written by R.D. Burman. When a journalist friend gave me Asha's number, I thought about doing a project through which we could really explore Burman's music."
"I was a little bit scared at first," says Bhosle from her home in Bombay. "I was in my 30s when I originally sang those numbers. Now, I am old enough. During the recording, David told me that he thought of Burman as a very big composer, someone like Mozart. I felt sad, because he died 12 years ago and he didn't get the recognition that he deserved while he was alive."
Apart from the obvious connotations of this homage, "Heart" delivers a powerful tribute to the genius of Burman in an oblique and slightly ironic way. For as much as the Kronos album is a joy to listen to, none of the quartet's renditions comes close to matching the sheer flamboyance of the Burman originals.
If there is one element that defines Burman's classic versions of these songs, it is the intoxicating sensuality of the arrangements and the orgasmic collision of disparate sounds -- that feeling of absolute recklessness that permeates most popular music from the Third World.
The Kronos' take, in contrast, is elegant and refined. Interestingly, this approach highlights Burman's talent as a composer of melodies.
"When I think of Burman as an orchestrator, he belongs in the same sentence as a Stravinsky or a Debussy," Harrington says. "Whereas as a melodicist, he belongs in the same sentence as Schubert, Gershwin or Agustin Lara."
A prince from the royal family of Triputa, Rahul Dev Burman was shy about his lineage, even though people in his state referred to him as "Your Highness." He had an insatiable passion for music. Whenever he traveled, he would run to the music stores, buy new records and inquire about the evening's live performances. A perfect example of Burman's artistry can be found on the second track of the Kronos album, the haunting "Rishte Bante Hain."
The original version of the song -- which is not from a film but rather from a 1985 album titled "Dil Padosi Hai" -- is as gorgeous as pop music gets, combining a downtempo drum-machine pattern with restless tabla while highlighting the purity of Bhosle's voice. The song ends with a synthesizer performing Bhosle's hypnotic vocal line one last time.
Equally beautiful
Kronos' version is equally poetic, the string quartet enhanced by electric sitar, Farfisa organ, the tabla of famed Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain and the pipa (a Chinese lute) of Wu Man.
"Burman was traveling in America and I had stayed here in India," explains Bhosle. "He remembered me and felt sad. That's how he wrote the song."
"That's some of the most beautiful music . . . that I know of," Harrington says. "Asha gives a new depth to this version -- the depth that she has at this point in her life. Her voice is truly one of the wonders of the world. I'm in awe of her as a musician and a person."
The near two weeks that Kronos spent in the Bay Area recording Bhosle gave Harrington the opportunity to learn more about the working methods of the Bollywood music industry -- as well as the logic behind those piercing female vocals that tend to annoy first-time Western listeners so much (the diva's voice sounds warmer and deeper these days).
`Incredible presence'
"The techniques of the time demanded singers have an incredible presence," he says. "They had to be able to cut through a whole room full of instruments. The singer would be in a corner and all sounds would be leaking into all the microphones."
The quartet had fun trying to decipher the many otherworldly sounds that populate Burman's classic sessions. Harrington lit three huge matches to duplicate the effect at the beginning of "Ekta Deshlai Kathi Iwalao," but was unable to figure out a weird sound on a track called "Mehbooba Mehbooba."
"It turns out it was a Listerine bottle," he says, laughing. "Burman was in the shower one morning, and he started playing the Listerine bottle."
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