The SoY Award for the Best Music Director goes to?

This year’s detailed review had more songs (152) than in any preceding year, and I had hoped that this would cover most of the noteworthy songs. Nevertheless, the readers added a large number of songs in the comments. This shows that there are a number of persons spread all over the world, who are deeply passionate about old Hindi film music and who consider it worthwhile to spend hours and hours reminiscing about songs, looking for them on the YT, and sharing their favourite songs and their thoughts on the SoY. This vindicates that my laborious exercise is, after all, not futile. We discover some forgotten or unknown gems, get new insights and become more aware of difference in tastes. I have to thank all the readers deeply for their valuable comments, which enrich the exercise and help me in my Wrap Ups. The Final Wrap Up is a distillation of the Overview post and the four Wrap Ups: Wrap Up 1 on the best male solos, Wrap Up 2 on the best ‘other’ female solos, Wrap Up 3 on the best Lata Mangeshkar songs and Wrap Up 4 on the best duets.

Our master statistician Venkataramanji continued to help us with the detailed data analysis. This year’s number of songs in the Select List (of memorable songs) in relation to the total number of songs in the year compares as follows with the previous years:

(The figures in italics given by me, based on HFGK and some estimation)

What does the above table show? One is the trivial part, that this year’s Select List represents 6% increase over 1951, 63% over 1953 and 81% over 1955. The more important part is the ratio with the total number of songs. Venkataramanji has estimated that there are no information or links for about 200-250 songs. If you take that out, even my large Select List comprises only 19% of the total songs. If you add the songs mentioned by the readers, we are talking about 25% of the total songs, which can be called worthy of notice and second hearing. My guess is that even at that time those songs would have sunk without notice. One wonders why all this fuss in our films to have ten songs. I like the current crop of films at least on the count that they have de-emphasised the importance of music. They are satisfied if they can hit one or two item songs.

A remarkable work has been done by our Ashokji (Ashok M Vaishnav) in taking the yearwise review to another level on his blog. Taking my overview post as the base, he has done micro analysis on various singer-MD combinations, as only he could do. He has done about two dozen posts, and for the convenience of the readers he has prepared a meta-summary of his work and put it on Google drive in pdf format. This is an invaluable archival material, and becomes a very important complement to my reviews on SoY.

To recapitulate, the prominent MDs are well-known. C Ramchandra was very prolific with the number of films, and consequently songs which are not only extremely popular to this day, but also of a very high quality. The roll call of Nirala, Samadhi, Sangeeta, Sangram and Sargam speaks of his prowess. The Great Mughal Naushad had a fetish for perfection and did less number of films compared to his other peers. But his two films, Babul and Daastan are enough to put him up at the top. The doyen of the earlier generation Anil Biswas gives some of his best music in Arzoo, Beqasoor and Lajawab. SD Burman with his two films Afsar and Mashal makes a mark. Roshan with his Bawre Nain, a year after his disastrous debut (with Neki Aur Badi), creates an all-time masterpiece, and if the best score in a film was the criteria, Bawre Nain would be many readers’ choice.

Bulo C Rani’s Jogan too belongs to the class of all-time great scores. There were some more. A song from Wafa made it to the best duet category. We discovered at least three songs from his unreleased film Rasiya, which instantly charmed everyone.

Vinod, now consigned to among forgotten composers, creates outstanding music in Anmol Ratan, three songs from which made to the bests in different Wrap Ups.

Talking of numbers, Husnlal-Bhagatram have the maximum number of films (7) in my Select List: Aadhi Raat, Apni Chhaya, Biraha Ki Raat, Chhoti Bhabhi, Gauna, Meena Bazaar and Sartaj. Several of their songs figure in the Wrap Ups.

A question has arisen whether it is possible to determine an overall ‘best’ song(s). We have two extreme views. Anu does not believe in such ‘bests’. Dinesh, at the other end, believes that not only we should have category-wise bests, but overall best or the ‘Sartaj’ song of the year. Most of us are in between – that it makes sense to talk of category-wise list of best songs, but doing an overall ‘best’ is probably not possible. Without taking any side, let me put at one place a table of the four best tens in different categories. Over to Dinesh to come up with the best overall song.

A useful exercise I did last year was to compile the MD-wise distribution of the above songs. Here is the table showing which MD accounts for how many of the ‘best’ songs in different categories.

Some observations from the above table are self-evident.  Naushad is the only music director present in all categories, though from only one film Babul.  We know that his musical landmarks had almost all the ten odd songs superhits.  While no MD accounts for more than one male solo, Lata Mangeshkar  has distinct CR-concentration, he accounting for four of the ten.

If we look at the readers’ choices, the outliers are Jignesh’s Vinod and SSW’s Sajjad Husain. Rest everyone is more conventional. Arvind’s choice for the best MD is SD Burman for Afsar. Ashokji’s choice for the best score in a film is Roshan’s Bawre Nain (however, his best overall MD is C Ramchandra), Arunji’s is C Ramchandra for Sargam, some have chosen Naushad for Babul or Bulo C Rani for Jogan. But most have considered the overall best MD in the year (and not for a particular film), and the generally agreed choice is C Ramchandra. No one can fault that. His dominance is also borne out by the table above.

I have to make three special mentions: Roshan for Bawre Nain, Vinod for Anmol Ratan and Bulo C Rani for his Jogan and the unreleased film Rasiya, for reasons I have mentioned in the beginning.

In conclusion:

The SoY Award for the Best Music Director goes to C Ramchandra.

SoY special mention: Roshan, Vinod and Bulo C Rani

Note: Hans has mentioned that ‘Rasiya’ does not belong to 1950, but probably some indeterminate year about mid-50s. Even if we exclude this, and replace its Lata song in the list by C Ramchandra or Anil Biswas, the outcome does not change.

{ 43 comments }