A.R. Rahman: a bonus

In the Slumdog Millionaire review the oth­er day I called com­poser A.R. Rahman a “Bollywood legend” and, for those of you unfa­mil­i­ar with his oeuvre I thought I’d give you a few samples to demon­strate what I mean.

I first heard Rahman’s music when I stumbled across an mp3 from the 1998 film Dil Se.. on some blog or oth­er. It was catchy as all get out and I was hooked. This is “Chal Chaiyya Chaiyya” which was re-purposed slightly for the Rahman-Lloyd Webber West End music­al “Bombay Dreams” in 2002.

[audio:https://funeralsandsnakes.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/chaiyya-chaiyya.mp3] Sukhwinder Singh & Sapna Awasthi – Chal Chaiyya Chaiyya (right click to download)

When I was run­ning the Paramount back in 2004, we had a reg­u­lar Bollywood Sunday night hire and one of the fea­tured films was the big budget epic drama Swades: We the People star­ring Shahrukh Khan. The pro­moter gave me a copy of the soundtrack as a thank you and it became one of my favour­ite CDs of the year. This is “Yeh Tara Woh Tara”, the open­ing theme:

[audio:https://funeralsandsnakes.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/01-yeh-tara-woh-tara.mp3] Udit Narayan, Master Vignesh, Baby Pooja & Kids – Yeh Tara Woh Tara (right click to download)

Finally, from Slumdog itself “Jai Ho”, one of two Rahman songs nom­in­ated for this year’s Best Original Song Oscar:

[audio:https://funeralsandsnakes.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/13-jai-ho.mp3] A.R. Rahman (feat. Sukhvinder Singh, Tanvi Shah, Mahalaxmi Iyer & Vijay Prakash) – Jai Ho (right click to download)

Rahman has two of the three Oscar song nom­in­a­tions this year. I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing what the tele­cast looks like. In fact, I may even take a little time off that after­noon to check it out.