Rahman’s achievements very early on include his use of eclectic instruments and unusual arrangements, his appreciation of unconventional voices, and his fearlessness in writing songs that could exist on their own beyond the movie’s narrative. Rahman’s sound, which he had tested in television commercials before Mani Ratnam signed him up for Roja, was fresh, unique and different from what had been heard before, but in one sense, the Tamil film soundscape had already shifted because of Illaiyaraja. There is no context provided for the musical journeys that preceded Rahman, most notably the one charted by South Indian film music composer Illaiyaraja, whose ability to fuse folk tunes with Western-style arrangements in the 1970s and ‘80s prepared the ground for Rahman’s experimentation. The 125-minute-long documentary is a celebration of Rahman’s career thus far, with an emphasis on his national and international work aimed at a general audience that will be unfamiliar with the bulk of his early work in South Indian cinema. Rahman’s background scores are rarely earworms, and his tendency to sing many of his own tunes is paying poor dividends.īut the tensions and disappointments that characterise Rahman’s current phase are absent from Jai Ho. Rahman is still an in-demand and overworked composer, but his labour produces one or two sticky compositions in a batch of four or five – a strike record that is normal for his peers, but not what we have come to expect from this prodigy.
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