A tribute to Mukesh on his death anniversary August 27, and a tribute to the music duo
In the surfeit of TV programmes associated with Centenary Celebrations of Indian Cinema last year, I closely followed the ones on film music. There was one presented by a young lady on Kalyanji-Anandji. After a quick reference to their early career in the 60s, she went in detail about their ‘music’. Her conclusion at the end of the half- an-hour programme was that KA were famous for their songs by Kishore Kumar for Amitabh Bachchan. This struck me as quite odd, as one singer I associated most prominently with the duo was Mukesh. For Mukesh too, if I make a list of his ‘quintessential’ songs, several KA songs would figure at the top. With about 100 songs they composed for him, they must be very close to SJ, if not outnumber them. This is remarkable, considering that Shankar Jaikishan, arguably the most successful composers in the history of film music, who had debuted a decade earlier, had made Mukesh a part of RK camp as the voice of Raj Kapoor. With such a handicap, it is to the credit of the genius of KA and their special bonding with Mukesh that they were able to create a special niche with his songs, no less in quality to SJ’s.
