The Golden Era of Dr.IR and Dr.SPB

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#331 பச்ச மலைப்பூவு நீ உச்சி மலைத்தேனு
(கிழக்கு வாசல், 1990)

'pachcha malappoovu nee uchchi malaiththEnu' of kizhakku vAsal

AhA, what a sweet tablA-flute delight from the masterly combination of rAsA & SPB! An evergreen fantastic melody that had been many times posted about in the 'last heard rAsA song thread' by me. I learnt from Sureshji that this has a Malayalam avatar also as 'enthu paranjAlum' in a Sathyan Anthikkad movie (which itself is a big recognition for this number, as not many rAsA numbers get transported from Thamizh to Malayalam while the other way around happens all the time).

The song has superb visuals too (Revathy on oonjal and Karthik singing to make her sleep on a moonlit night) and that is the reason I want to watch the rest of the movie! Well, I'll get to that some day I'll rate this song among the best solos of SPB under any MD and will definitely include this in the top ten of IR-SPB solos of all-time. Such a sweet delight that can go on repeat for days and weeks on my car! SPB's performance in this song is another text book in playback singing! Raja beautifies it with string sections too and makes one take an emotional trip to never-visited-places and creates rOmAnjam in many places in this song! I will even go to the extent of calling this song a "life-time-achievement" by the legends!

The obvious question now could be - if I have so much of liking for this song, how come I don't even know the year of its release...well, I got connected to this song so strongly very late - only in the year 2000 On a lazy evening in that year, I picked a cassette named "IR's tabla hits" from a small shop in kal maNdapam of Palakkad (an area where lot of Thamizh people live) while waiting for a friend or something like that. It was years after even tfmpage relationship From that time onwards, the song had been heard 1000s of times on the car! (That cassette itself was a big hit even while in India, during long rides on the Indica).

How did I miss getting a personal copy of this beauty in 1990? Well, it could be that the movie / songs arrived during the time when I was out of action due to an accident for 3 months (kAl odinja bedla thAn kidakka mudiyum, kaiyum vERa in plaster - due to bike-truck heads on...with access to only hindu paper that didn't carry much TF/TFM news...family, phone calls and visitors were big entertainment anyways with strictly no TV. Visitors typically came sadly but went back happily (seeing me alive & convalescing and cracking dry jokes - e.g. one fellow's Q: "did you lose a lot of blood" ; my ans: "irundhA dhAna lose paNNa")

Possibly this movie & songs came and went during that time...what followed in life was quick ramp-up at workplace followed by the big-life-event (kAl kattu of a different kind, not made with plaster of paris) and movie-TFM-songs-their-stats-etc weren't big priorities ever after