Madan Mohan The Unheard: Give Me More
Remember the music of Woh Kaun Thi? Or of Haqeeqat? Or of Mera Saaya? Or of Aashiana, Adalat, Anpadh, Bhai Bhai, Manmauji, Sanjog, Dekh Kabira Roya, Sharabi, Ghazal, Jahanara, Heer Ranjha, Hanste Zakhm, Chirag, Dastak, Mausam And Laila Majnu?
The man behind all this, the legendary Madan Mohan, passed away 34 years ago, on July 14, 1975. And this June 25 will be his 85th birth anniversary. Mark this date, because that is the day when his son, Sanjeev Kohli (long associated with Yashraj Films), will bring to us “Tere Bagair”, an album of 15 of Madan Mohan’s ‘new’ songs, five of them never heard before, and the remaining ten probably part of “A Treasure Revealed”, an album meant for very limited circulation immediately after his death.
Yash Chopra’s Veer-Zaara had used some of Madan Mohan’s music, but that was ‘recreated’ to suit today’s times. What Tere Bagain (YRF Music) contains is the original recordings (though with some additional ‘supportive’ music), and trust me, they are pure magic (I just heard them, thanks to an advance copy I received for a story I am doing on the album in my newspaper).
In a career of 25 years, Madan Mohan composed for over 100 films. When he passed away when he was only 51, a number of tunes composed by him remained unrecorded. He had hummed these tunes on tape as they came to him, for possible use in future projects. The family has also preserved to the best extent possible some recorded songs from films that remained incomplete, as a result of which they remained unheard.
The songs in the album, recorded between 1964 and 1972, were sung by the likes of Lata Mangeshkar (three), Asha Bhosle (three, including one with Rafi, Balbir, Brij Bhushan), Mohammed Rafi (seven, including the group song with Bhosle), Talat Mahmood (one), and Kishore Kumar (one) and are from a range of genres. A second CD in the set on the making of Veer-Zaara’s music.
June 25 is the date when www.madanmohan.in will also be launched. I pray and hope this would also have all the Madan Mohan songs, like you can have all Talat Mahmood songs www.talatmahmood.net, again another son (Khalid Mahmood)’s single-handed tribute to his father. Even better still, can we dream of a comprehensive website for each one of our musical geniuses? Will someday, somebody, do it? Please?
Tags: Madan Mohan, Sanjeev Kohli, YRF Music
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Is this is deliberate or a strange co-incidence?
anyways its nice to focus attention on a deserving musician and a landmark event.
First Dr.saab writes about Sanjeev Kohli – the beta and then Utpal writes about Madanj – the father
@Sethumadhavan: Of course, a coincidence. I just wrote my piece after listening to the album. Of course, I saw the other piece as I was about to upload mine, but then, the music is so beautiful that maybe you too will write a piece after you hear it.
Utpal, I look forward to hearing these Madan Mohan melodies. And thanks for the info about the Madan Mohan site. That is great news.
And yes, I second your views totally: there should be Websites on each and every one of our musical geniuses of yesteryear. I have actually been toying with the idea of creating a site on old Hindi films for awhile, which will include the music composers, of course. It is a long-term project. It would be great to collaborate with other die-hard movie buffs on a large-scale project such as this. Anyone interested? I would love to hear from people. If so, please email me at niveditaramakrishnan@gmail.com