Till the day I’m alive and till Lata is there, she will always be my first choice,” composer Madan Mohan minced no words when Asha Bhosle once complained, “You give me ordinary tunes, but Didi your best tunes.” S D Burman

There is only one sun and one moon, there can be only one T M S,” said legendary Tamil film music composer M S Viswanathan at an event many years ago. T M Soundararajan was one of the greatest singers in Tamil cinema history.

Anand Akela from Marwar Mundwa. Allah Rakha from Jhumritalaiya. Sharad Agarwal from Rajnandgaon. And countless others from Yeotmal, Mancherial, Nanded, Karim Nagar, Nepa Nagar, Indore, Rajkot, Beed, Ujjain and Dhanbad. People to whom I’ll forever be indebted for introducing some of the greatest Hindi film songs to

Flute maestro Hariprasad Chaurasia seems a genetic oddity — a consummate and world renowned musician born to a wrestler father and a homemaker mother who never went to school. The parents had no artistic pretensions, the mother died young, when the boy was barely four, and the

For Hindustani music lovers with Hyderabad connections, the sixties and seventies of the last century were a golden era of sorts, with high quality concerts on offer at the Health League grounds and other open-air venues in the twin cities, as well as the modern Ravindra Bharati

Geet Gaya Pathharon Ne.’ This lovely song from the 1960s Hindi film of the same name had me wrong-guessing the identity of its singer. Was it Asha Bhosle or Geeta Dutt, I wondered. I could not make up my mind, for the voice sounded slightly different from

In 1937, a Bombay business wanted the best and most prestigious singer to perform at a family event. Kundan Lal Saigal was offered Rs.25,000 for a few hours. But he preferred to keep his promise to a poor lighting assistant, whose daughter was getting married. Saigal sang

Just mention her name, and music lovers get misty-eyed. Geeta Dutt had an exquisite, almost ethereal voice, and gave Bollywood music some of its most radiant gems during the late 1940s and 1950s. Hers was a short but resplendent life and career, which ended tragically in 1972

If Allah wants to sing, it would be in Bhimsen Joshi’s voice.” This, says Dr Nagaraj Rao Havaldar, the late Kirana gharana icon’s disciple-biographer, is how a Pakistani music critic paid his homage to Joshi. And every time you listen to the maestro’s impassioned rendering of Tum

A song so powerful that it can bring a dead man to life.” That’s how Kishore Kumar described Dum maro dum, Asha Bhosle’s peppy song in Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971). Composed by R D Burman for Dev Anand, the song became the international anthem of the Hippie