Pancham Again
Today as I settle myself on this rainy day and think about Pancham on his yet another birth anniversary, I keep on going back in …. flashback mode. As a an normal middle class kid with access to only Vividh Bharti, I heard many songs in my childhood and never bothered to figure out the composer or the techniques they were employing. RD Burman was the first one to create an impression on me. He “sounded” different. The strange unconventional sounds from the conga drum, his special tabla and the guitar. His Flute sounded divine. It was not the normal shrill sounding flute that music composers of that era used but a sound full of bass, richness and maturity. The older music directors used Dholak for getting bass. RD used the bass guitar to get the fullness to a song. Soon, I could tell a RD song from Laxmi Pyare, Kalyanji and so on. He was accused of being too Western for Indian tastes. That’s the hypocrisy that we are so fond of. His classic composition in his first film Chhote