All Great Mds' Preference For Rafi Saab!, Some Widely-reported Stories On This Options

[venkat]

Friends,

That all great MDs during the Platinum-era of HFM from 1947 to 1972 had a distinct preference for Rafi Saab is crystal-clear, well-known and needs no debate, as the historical facts and statistics speak for themselves.

But, there were some instances of extreme display of this tendency by some of the great MDs of olden days.

In this thread, let us narrate and discuss some of such instances.

To start with, I recall one radio interview that I heard very long back, which gave me the following information.

In early, mid and late fifties, it was fashionable to listen to Talat Mehmood songs and somewhat over-rate him. Many Industry bigwigs, such as Anil Biswas, Bimal Roy, etc., too were not immune to this tendency.

So, when Bimal Roy was making Sujata (1959), he had advised S.D.Burman to use Talat Mehmood for the great SDB composition, "Jalte Hain Jis Ke Liye".

But, S.D.Burman was far from enamoured by Talat Mehmood's style of singing. He wanted to utilise only Rafi Saab for this sublime composition and tried to reason out with Bimal Roy. But, as Bimal Roy wouldn't listen, he had to finally use Talat Mehmood.

But, what is really amusing was that during the rehearsals and recording, S.D.Burman made no secret of his displeasure to poor Talat Ji. He even used to say, "Yeh Boda Achha Composition Hoy. Is Ko Khorab Mot Koro".

Such was SDB's bullishness on Rafi Saab.

More later.

Venkat

PS. It is a different matter that the song, "Jalte Hain Jis Ke liye", from Sujata happened to have been sung by Talat Mehmood extremely well and it is a great favorite of mine. But, the above was just to illustrate great MDs' stubborn preference for Rafi Saab.

This post has been edited by venkat: Sep 27 2008, 04:12 PM

[nasir]

Thank you very much Venkatji for continuing those interesting pieces of information about Music Directors' preference of Rafi Sahaab.

Regarding SJ, can we safely say that they always went for Rafi Sahaab despite the impression that they belonged to the RK Camp? Can we safely say that the era of Shammi Kapoor and Rajendra Kumar was more responsible for SJ - Rafi Sahaab combine?

What about Hemant Kumar? Since he was himself a singer can we say that he utilized Rafi Sahaab to a minimum? Ditto for C. Ramchandra. Of course, he used him in INSANIYAT for Dilip Kumar. A year before he didn't for that famous duet KITNA HASEEN HAI MAUSAM in AZAAD, while five years earlier he used him in that famous duet: JAB SHAMMA NE PUKAARA ....

Is it true that V.Shantaram (producer-director) too hardly utilized Rafi Sahaab though in SEHRA we have that masterpiece of Rafi Sahaab: TAQDEER KA FASAANA...


These were just some thoughts passing in my mind on this subject.