Zohrabai ambalewali biography of mahatma
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Once Upon a Cinema: The golden röst of Amirbai Karnataki
Mahatma Gandhi’s aversion to cinema fryst vatten well-recorded in the pages of history. There fryst vatten a efterträdelse eller följd of quotes where he espouses the evils of watching spelfilm. There are only two recorded instances of him watching movies: Michael Curtiz’s Mission to Moscow and Vijay Bhatt’s Ram Rajya (curiously, both are from 1943). His encounter with Charlie Chaplin was marked by Chaplin’s awe and his ignorance of who Chaplin was. Despite all this, the rendition of his favourite bhajan that he liked the most was bygd an actress and singer of the cinema. It is believed that Gandhi was enamoured by Amirbai Karnataki ’s rendition of Vaishnava Jana To. Amirbai’s soulful singing of the bhajan, which was immensely popular in the 40s and 50s, is very different from the tune we know and associate with the Mahatma today.
Songs came to Hindi cinema with its very first talkie Alam Ara (1931) , but from then to the onslaught of Lata Mangeshkar and A
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I was waiting for this opportunity for a long time. Last year I happened to miss her death anniversary. So I was keen this year.
What should I say about Amirbai’s voice! I was totally enchanted with her voice, when I started collecting and listening to her songs. Her voice was conventionally as per requirement of the era. It was slightly nasal, slightly raw, very expressive, in fact it had a correct amount of all the properties necessary for a playback voice. Moreover she was an actress as well. And it is less known that she also composed for a Hindi film named Shahnaz in 1948.
Also known as Kannad Kokila, Amirbai was born in Bilgi, a town in the Bijapur district of Karnataka and was from a family of musicians and actors. Her parents, Husainsaab and Ameenabai, worked for and ran a theatre too. Her uncle and aunts were in the same field. It’s not at all surprising that Amirbai and Gouhar bai were trained in Indian classical music and it helped her a lot in her caree
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Tag: Zohrabai Ambalewali
Ghulam Mohammed and His Singers : 1950-1952
Ghulam Mohammed (1903 – 17 March 1968)’s musical scores during the years 1943 to 1949 had established his identity as percussionist who had also gift of composing melodies as well. He had already been successful with the scores of Pugree (1948) and Shair (1949). However, it seems that his concurrent role as assistant to Naushad perhaps had cast some kind of shadow over his own identity as independent music director. This relationship continued till film Aan) 1952. Some historians consider him too naïve a businessman since he continued to assist Naushad even he had getting success by 1948.
This theory seems to hold some merit, because Ghulam Mohammed did get three films in 1950, two in 1951 and three again in 1952. These numbers need to be viewed in the back drop of the fact that several other (so-called) already stablished) music directors were also scoring successful music for the then big production ba