Ilaiyaraja's New Albums 2016-18, News and Titbits

[rajsekar]

Rasayya, Thumbur, Krish - Well said. Some of the best and biggest albums of Raaja came from worst performing movies. That's the reality and how movie industry works. Raaja always quotes this phrase "Anything can happen in Cinema". Look at ace director Sridhar's "Ninaivellam Nithya" with poorly choreographed songs. The songs in NN is Gold standard for film music. Unfortunately the super-hit songs couldn't lift the box office collections. Later, Director Sridhar stuck gold with his mediocre movie "Thendrale Ennai Thodu" with a brilliant song album. The movie ran for more than a year in Salem and Coimbatore.

Bharathiraaja suffered with his flop "Nizhalgal" but the album had Platinum jubilee with Gold standard composition. Many such super albums came from box office disasters - Pattakathi Bhairavan, Solla Thudikuthu Manasu, Gramathu Athiyayam, many Vijaykanth films, Vikram, just to name a few from his cache of more than 1000 film albums. We all know hundreds of films which ran just for His songs. The current reality is that movies should have 100% superior script, story line, acting and novelty to even run for 30 days. There are no more 50 days run, except for few good story lines. I feel blessed to keep hearing Raaja's songs w/o knowing which movie it appeared 'cause the tunes still reverberate after all these years. Everything else is noise. I would like to see Raaja's background scores being performed in a live stage with full orchestration. The cancelled show at Los Angeles Walt Disney Concert Hall was the first such experiment to showcase his background score. John Williams has done few performances of his scores in US and UK.