Best duets

Best songs of 1945: Wrap Up 3

1945 Best duets November 16, 2020

And the Award for the Best Duet goes to? We have seen in some years that either male solos or female solos may be tepid, but duets never disappoint. That has to do with combinatorics. If there are, say, 3 prominent male singers and 4 female singers in a year, there are 12 possible voice […]

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Hemant Kumar’s Hindi Duet Compositions

Hemant Kumar and his Duet singers October 27, 2020

Guest article by Ashok M Vaishnav in the continuing series of Hemant Kumar’s Centenary (16 June 1920 – 26 September 1989)  celebrations (The Grand Centenary Celebrations of Hemant Kumar were set off by N Venkataraman’s omnibus article Hemantayan Part 1 on his Birth Centenary 16 June 2020, which covered his early life and his career […]

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Chitragupta’s duets for Rafi: Melody Personified

Chitragupta and Rafi July 31, 2020

A tribute to Rafi (24 December 1924 – 31 July 1980) on his 40th Remembrance Day Today is the 40th Remembrance Day of Rafi. He was the most versatile playback singer of the Golden Era of film music and, more importantly, he was universally known as a good human being, without malice to anyone, and […]

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Best songs of 1946: Wrap Up 3

Aawaz de kahan hai December 6, 2019

And the SoY award for the best duet goes to? In the year-wise reviews of the best songs, as we entered pre-1949, we gradually encountered less and less familiar songs. It became quite pronounced in 1946, in which I could include only 81 MEMORABLE songs in my Overview post, which is far less than the […]

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Hemant Kumar’s duets with ‘other’ singers

Hemant Kumar, Asha Bhosle and Geeta Dutt June 16, 2019

A tribute to Hemant Kumar on his 99th birth anniversary (16 June 1920 – 26 September 1989) I had written on the best duets of Hemant Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar in my first year of blogging. Then I had said: “Hemant Kumar in his voice brought the beauty of Bengal and melody of Rabindra Sangeet. […]

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Rafi’s best duets by Madan Mohan

Madan Mohan and Rafi December 14, 2018

The best songs of Rafi for any music director would include a number of duets. So it is for Madan Mohan, despite the fact that his solos for Rafi are significantly more than the duets. That is an exception to the general trend of duets being far more in number than male solos. Since we […]

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Rafi’s duets by Roshan

Roshan and Rafi November 5, 2018

My post on Rafi’s solos by Roshan appeared more than six years ago, several years before I started the series on the stalwart music directors. And the reason was simple: Roshan ranked among the top in my reckoning for Rafi songs, along with Naushad, SD Burman and OP Nayyar. Duets have no less importance in […]

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Best songs of 1947: Wrap Up 3

Best films of 1947 October 11, 2018

And the Song of Yore Award for the Best Duet goes to? The total number of duets in the list of ‘Memorable Songs’ in the Overview post on the best songs of 1947 is about 30 out of 119. This is about 50% more than the male solos, but less than half the female solos. […]

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Duets of OP Nayyar: Part 2

OP Nayyar December 3, 2017

Guest article by Ravindra Kelkar (Of the 223 total duets composed by OP Nayyar, the most conspicuous are male-female duets in which the male voice is Rafi and the female voice, either Geeta Dutt or Shamshad Begum or Asha Bhosle. These are 119 in number, and were the subject matter of Ravindra Kelkar’s last post […]

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Duets of OP Nayyar: Part 1

OP Nayyar November 23, 2017

Guest article by Ravindra Kelkar (SoY readers would recall that Ravindra Kelkar has been making valuable contributions on OP Nayyar through his guest articles and, thus, filling up a gap in SoY. He has contributed three articles so far: ‘Three distinct phases of OP Nayyar’; OP Nayyar-Geeta Dutt: A peerless combination’; and OP Nayyar’s influence […]

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