I am yet to hear a decent audio quality of songs like Uravugalthodarkadhai or IlamaiEnnumPoongatru, which sound like the tape was dipped into water first and then used for recording.Īs his musical prowess was hampered by the film industry, he briefly dabbled into producing independent instrumental albums (How to name it & Nothing but wind) which had shades of Indian and western classical music. Even the vocals quality is so poor in some evergreen songs that we listen even today. The recordings do no justification to the dense orchestral layers that Ilaiyaraaja adds to his songs and background scores. He not only gave excellent scores for hundreds of middling films for two decades, but he was also stuck with poor sound technology of that era.

I personally, have always felt Ilaiyaraaja the genius composer who was singularly producing phenomenal work, as a victim of his generation. The era was dominated by sub par films, which are remembered today only by Ilaiyaraaja’s songs and background scores. But bear in mind that Ilaiayaraaja was scoring at a prolific speed (over 650 films between 1976-1993) and there were only a handful of directors giving some challenging work for Ilaiyaraaja. Invariably all of their films had scores by Ilaiyaraaja, which elevated their films to a different plane. These directors changed the course of tamil cinema by making films that were rooted on human emotions, instead of larger than life dramas which was the norm at that period. At the same time emerged a new generation of directors like Barathi Raja (16 Vayadhinile 1977), Mahendran (MullumMalarum 1978), BaluMahendra (Tamil debut – AzhiyaadhaKolangal 1979), later joined by Mani Ratnam (PallaviAnuPallavi, 1983). While yesteryear stalwarts like Shivaji, Jai Shankar were fading, Kamal Haasan was at the pinnacle of stardom and Rajinikanth had just made his debut a year earlier. Tamil cinema which had origins from stage plays, was still dominated by theatrics in all aspects of cinema from dialogues, acting to even costumes. That marks the transition period not only in tamil film music, but overall filmmaking in tamil cinema. It’s well known fact that Ilaiyaraaja made a spectacular debut in 1976 film Annakili.

This is a write up leading to celebrate Ilaiayaraaja’s achievement in composing a symphony and pondering if his path would have changed had he released the symphony. The Symphony was never released to the public and Ilaiyaraaja has largely remained silent about this work since then. At that time he was the first Asian composer to do so. 2018 marks 25th anniversary of Ilaiyaraaja composing and recording a Symphony with Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London.

Ilayaraja nothing but wind