The genius Carnatic vocalist Madurai Mani Iyer (1912-1968), possibly the greatest exponent of live improvisation in Carnatic classical music, popularized this "English Note" composed by Harikesanallur Mutthiah Bhagavathar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNjl5w8Prw0) to showcase his autodidactic (self teaching) talent in expanding beyond his strictly classical training. This piece was extremely popular with an independence era audience that felt pride in one of their own "getting" western music while no Englishman could perform a Thodi alapana. 

Obviously as a Indian classical musician, Mutthiah Bhagavathar only composed the main melody, an incredibly catchy and hummable tune that would have worked in the best courts of Vienna. But Western classical music is about harmony layered over the melody and I was surprised that no one had taken a crack at taking this really catch melody and writing a String quartet around it. 

There were some interesting challenges. Mani Iyer clearly did not keep harmony in mind when he wrote the piece so there are places where the melodic sequence presents quite a hard challenge to harmonize, but all in all, I think it turned out okayish. 

Again, I am quite an amateur and It will be great if more talented musicians take this melody and set it to even better background scores :)

English Note (by Madurai Mani Iyer) - String Quartet

Hearty Thanks To Samjo511 & Indian Movie BGMs.
© AR Rahman

Rhythm - BGM | A.R. Rahman

ARR - Flute

Dil Se - BGM - Love Theme

An adaptation of Ilayaraja's "En Iniya Pon" from the film Moodu Pani with fellow Raja enthusiast @mediumcoffee . This project is called "Le Rogeur" and the idea was not to do a literal cover but improvise liberally while still retaining the semblance of the original song. Here we take Raja's original harmony/chord structure & use more jazzy variants. The other improv happens in the interludes, where we start out sounding like the original interlude but wander off into different territories. We hope to do a few more of these under the "Le Rogeur" moniker over the next few weeks. And oh, another thing. For this project, in recognition of the technical challenges of Ilayaraja's golden years (the 80s), we will only use real instruments live-recorded without any software programming. 

Piano, Tonewheel organ - @Mediumcoffee
Vocals, Cello, Guitar, Bass - @krishashok

En Iniya Pon

Theri Mass Scene BGM

Music from the epic motion picture - Baahubali2.

All the rights are with the creator and the respective audio labels.

Title Credits - Rang De Basanti BGM

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