Untrained and with no backers within the Hindi movie trade, a younger KK (Krishnakumar Kunnath) had begun knocking the doorways of music composers within the early Nineteen Nineties. Musician Lesle Lewis remembers his ‘Colonial Cousins’ bandmate Hariharan asking him to check out the brand new child on the block.
“KK came to me and asked whether I can make an album for him. Not everyone could make an album back then. You had to get signed by a record label, fund a video and had to have some kind of a name. I told him that it is a long shot and that he will have to wait. But, since he was talented, I started calling him for jingles. Finally, after some years, I took some of his jingles to Sony Music and asked them to listen to this great upcoming singer. They loved his voice and asked me to make an album with him,” Lewis talks to The Hindu, a day after KK’s premature demise after a live performance in Kolkata.
That album ‘Pal’ got here out in 1999, standing out with its mushy rock influences amid a sea of remixes and bubblegum pop within the unbiased music scene. After KK’s passing away, the songs from the album, together with ‘Pal’ and ‘Yaaron’, had been among the many most shared by his followers. The album was all the fad on campuses and reunions, and nonetheless stays so.
Lesle, who composed the music, introduced in a stay band for the recording, a rarity in these instances. He had the boldness to experiment with the younger singer, who additionally had the background of singing in some rock bands.
“He would come home, sit and learn the songs written by Mehboob and learn its nuances. We waited until he would get used to the songs, so that he would sing in his own unique style. At that time, we couldn’t make it more rock, and chose a more melodious pop rock sound, as the general population weren’t ready for rock even then, but that ensured that the album would reach a larger audience,” says Lewis.
Singers from South India, particularly Kerala, usually discover it exhausting to lose the affect of their mom tongue whereas rendering Hindi songs, and vice versa. But the songs of KK would by no means give away his roots, for he had that skill to adapt his voice to the language. Though the pure diction in Hindi could possibly be attributed to his rising up years in Delhi, even when he sang an all out Tamil dappankuthu track ‘Appadi Podu’, nobody might guess that it was sung by a non-Tamilian. This was one of many components which helped him make it large each in Bollywood and the Tamil industries.
Even although he belonged to Thrissur and was born to Malayali dad and mom, ‘Rahasyamay’ from Puthiya Mukham (2009) was his solely Malayalam track in a profession spanning greater than 25 years. Deepak Dev, music composer for the movie, knew him from his early days in Mumbai, the place he was working as an assistant music director.
“KK was already a big singer then. I was just a keyboard programmer. But, knowing that I am a Malayali, he came and talked to me. He told me he had no Malayalis in his friends circle there and he was looking for someone to speak the language to. It was a fanboy moment for me as I had grown up listening to albums like ‘Pal’. He told me that he had not sung in Malayalam till then. After I became a music director, I waited till I found the right song for him. Though he didn’t know how to write Malayalam, he was very fluent in the language and had the right diction. When I spoke to him a few months back, he had told me that he hasn’t been able to work in Malayalam after that and that he is working on a new album,” says Deepak Dev.
For the listeners in Kerala, who started following him from the times of working with A.R. Rahman for ‘ Kalluri Salai’ from Kathal Desam (1996) and ‘ Strawberry Kanne’ from Minsara Kanavu (1997), his works from each Bollywood and the Tamil trade stay favourites. Be it when singing ‘ Khuda Jaane’ or ‘Uyirin Uyire’, he was all the time seen by Malayalis as considered one of their very own, though his diction by no means gave it away.
Source: www.thehindu.com
