Naushad Ali

 

Naushad Ali 

I wish to start about this great and admirable person NAUSHAD ALI quoting what Ajay Mankotia told about him on 05 May 2016 which is the death Anniversary of Naushad Ali.

Old masters never die. The music lovers and connoisseurs still adore him. Like a diamond, a genius is forever. 

Shanmukhananda Auditorium in Mumbai cannot be accused of being a small hall. Far from it, it is one of the biggest in Asia with a seating capacity of more than 2,700 people at three levels. If you add the aisles and other spaces on the sides and at the rear, then the audience can swell up to 5,000. About three decades back, I attended a felicitation ceremony for a music director who was no longer active. It was his birthday. The entry was free, and the hall was packed to the rafters. Before the official program began with Dilip Kumar as the main speaker, short clips of his songs were screened on one side of the empty stage. The crowd, mostly on the wrong side of the 50s, was in raptures. But what was this? Everyone thought that he had hung up his baton, but the Master of Ceremonies announced during the program that he had just been signed for Akbar Khan’s Taj Mahal- An Eternal Love Story (it was released a few years later in 2005). There was thunderous applause. The virtuoso would be weaving his magic a little bit longer! Naushad Ali His hold over the musical firmament in Hindi films was not commensurate with the number of years he spent in the industry and the meagre number of films (just 65) he had to show for it. But it is the best work that God (and the public) wants, not the dregs of exhaustion. 26 silver jubilees, eight golden jubilees, four diamond jubilees are what Naushad’s CV reveals, besides many other things. Naushad Ali (25 December 1919 – 5 May 2006) was an Indian music director for Hindi films. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest and foremost music directors of the Hindi film industry. He is particularly known for popularising the use of classical music in films. 

Early Life

Naushad Ali was born and raised in Lucknow, a city with a long tradition as a center of Indian Muslim culture. His father, Wahid Ali, was a munshi (court clerk). As a child, Naushad would visit the annual fair at the Deva Sharif in , 25 km from Barabanki, Lucknow, where all the great quawwals and musicians of those days would perform before the devotees. He studied Hindustani music there under Ustad Gurbart Ali, Ustad Yusuf Ali, Ustad Babban Saheb and others. He also repaired harmoniums. As a lad, he joined a junior theatrical club and was appointed the club's music maestro for their theatrical presentations. He used to watch silent films at the Royal theatre in Lucknow. Theatre owners would hire a team of musicians to play the tabla, harmonium, sitar, and violin. The musicians would watch the film first, make notes, finalise the scales required. When the show began in the evening, they would sit in front of the screen and play music for the scenes. This was a great way to be entertained and learn music at the same time. It made him grasp the nuances required in composing a film's background music score.

Career of Naushad

In the late 1930s he came to Bombay to be a success as musician. But he had to struggle to make it to the top. Initially he faced rebuffs, and had to endure periods of utter deprivation. After much struggle he got to work with composer Khemchand Prakash, as his assistant. Naushad regards this experience to be the most valuable of all in terms of learning. Naushad even spent nights sleeping on footpaths before he finally secured a job as a pianist in composer Mushtaq Hussain 's orchestra. as his assistant and taught him, an act for which he remained extremely grateful throughout his life. 

Soon, Naushad got his break with the film Prem Nagar (1940), but it was only with Sharda (1942) that he got attention. He first got noticed with A.R. Kardar's film Sharda Composer Khemchand Prakash took him on (1942) wherein 13-year-old Suraiya debuted with the song "Panchhi Ja" for the playback for heroine Mehtab. The film Ratan (1944) took him right to the top, and from then on he could produce blockbuster songs for appropriately smash hit films, most notably films made by either Abdul Rashid Kardar or Mehboob Khan.

 Film expert and author Rajesh Subramanian opines that Kardar productions spent Rupees seventy five thousand in 1944 to make Rattan. The music by Naushad saheb was such a phenomenal hit that the company earned Rs 3 lacs as royalty from gramophone sales in the first year Naushad's style was renowned for his ability to incorporate classical rhythms into his symphonies. He based his music upon the "ragas" that formed a basis in Indian classical music, and thus his music took on complex formations and . His taste for classical music was legendary - in the Mughal musical Baiju Bawra (1952), he used actual classical singers to sing his ghazals.

 In spite of his classical tendencies, he could also keep up with the times and adapt Western techniques and instruments into his music, as heard in the films Jadoo (1951) and Mere Mehboob (1963). Naushad was also among the first to use the techniques of sound mixing, of separate recording of vocal and music tracks in playback singing, and using background scores to enhance characters' moods and dialogues through music. From 1942 until the late 1960s, he was one of the top music directors in Hindi films. 

While he did 65 films during his lifetime, 26 of those films celebrated Silver jubilees (25 weeks run) – 8 celebrated golden jubilees (50 weeks run) and 4 celebrated diamond jubilees (60 weeks run) – (inclusive count – a diamond jubilee film also celebrates Silver and Golden jubilees). Naushad worked with several lyricists, including Shakeel Badayuni, Majrooh Sultanpuri, D. N. Madhok, Zia Sarhadi, Yusufali Kechery and Khumar Barabankvi. Mother India (1957) for which he had composed music. This film was the first Indian film that got nominated for an Oscar award.

 Awards and Honours 

• 1954: Filmfare Best Music Director Award – Baiju Bawra 

• 1961: Bengal Film Journalists' Association's 'Best Music Director Award' for film Gunga Jumna (1961) 

• 1975: "Naushad Ali", a 30-minute documentary film produced by Television Centre, Mumbai 

• 1981: Dadasaheb Phalke Award 

• 1984: Lata Mangeshkar Award (Madhya Pradesh State Government's Award) 

• 1987: Amir Khusrow Award 

• 1990: Best Music for The Sword of Tipu Sultan TV series 

• 1992: Sangeet Natak Akademi Award 

• 1992: Padma Bhushan Award for his lifetime contributions to Indian cinema 

• 1993: Awadh Ratna Award by Government of Uttar Pradesh 

• 1994: Maharashtra Gaurav Puruskar Award 

• 2000: Screen Lifetime Achievement Award 

• 2008: The Carter Road situated at Bandra, was renamed as Sangeet Samrat Naushad Ali Marg in his memory 

Positions Held 

• President of Cine Music Directors Association 

• Chairman of Indian Performing Rights Society 

• President of Maharashtra State Angling Association

• President of Alam-E-Urdu Conference (Delhi) 

• The title of Special Executive Magistrate, Mumbai 

The songs Naushad composed for the 1988 Malayalam film Dhwani which were sung by P. Suseela & K. J. Yesudas are evergreen superhits that Malayalis do repeatedly listen to even after 3 decades. Five films have been made on his life and work. Biographical books published are Dastaan-E-Naushad (Marathi) by Shashikant Kinikar; Aaj Gaawat Man Mero (Gujarati); Hindi and Urdu biographical sketches in Shama & Sushma Magazines respectively, titled "Naushad Ki Kahani, Naushad Ki Zubani"; the last one was translated into Marathi by Shashikant Kinikar. Kinikar also came up with a book titled "Notes of Naushad" which puts together some interesting anecdotes of Naushad's life.

 Naushad also composed background music for the TV serial "Akbar the Great" telecast in 1988 which was directed by Akbar Khan, brother of Hindi film stars Sanjay Khan and Feroze Khan as was also The Sword of Tipu Sultan produced and directed by Sanjay Khan and Akbar Khan which was telecast in 1990 and became very popular. Naushad was ranked as one of the most respected and successful music directors of Indian Film Industry. 

Naushad had requested the Maharashtra State Government to sanction a plot for an institution for promoting Hindustani music. This was sanctioned during his lifetime and the 'Naushad Academy of Hindustani Sangeet' was formed.  Music Style Naushad gave a new trend to popular film music by basing his tunes on classical music ragas and folk music. Naushad was known for his skillful adaptation of the classical musical tradition for movie songs. For some movies like Baiju Bawra, he composed all scores in classical raga modes and arranged for the well-known vocalist Amir Khan to be a music consultant for this film. Naushad could easily work with Western instruments, including the clarinet, the mandolin and the accordion. He could incorporate Western musical idioms in his compositions and compose for Western-style orchestras. 

During the early 1940s, recordings were done in quiet parks and gardens after midnight because the studios did not have sound-proof recording rooms. In the gardens, there would be no echo and disturbances, unlike the studios where the sound reverberated because of the tin roofs. For films like 'Uran Khatola' and 'Amar', he recorded the voice of a particular artiste on a scale of 90, then recorded it on 70, then on 50 and so on. After the complete recording, it was played for the scene and the impact it created was terrific. 

Many Firsts of Naushad

He was one of the first to introduce sound mixing and the separate recording of voice and music tracks in playback singing. He was the first to combine the flute and the clarinet, the sitar and mandolin. He also introduced the accordion to Hindi film music and was among the first to focus on background music to extend characters' moods and dialogue through music. 

For Aan (1952), he was the first to use a 100-piece orchestra. He was the first composer to have developed the system of western notation in India. The notation for the music of the film 'Aan' was published in book form in London. In Uran Khatola (1955), he recorded an entire song without the use of orchestra, having replaced the sound of musical instruments with choral sound of humming. For Mughal-e-Azam (1960) song Ae Mohabbat Zindabad, he used a chorus of 100 persons. For Ganga Jamuna (1961), he used lyrics in chaste Bhojpuri dialect. He used just six instruments in the title song of Mere Mehboob (1963). 

 In 2004, a colorized version of the classic Mughal-e-Azam (1960) was released, for which Naushad had the orchestral music specially re-created (in Dolby Digital) by today’s industry musicians, while maintaining all the solo vocals from the original soundtrack. To elaborate, the playback vocals (though not the chorus) recorded four decades ago are mixed with orchestra tracks created in the present millennium.

But perhaps his greatest contribution was to bring Indian classical music into the film medium. Many of his compositions were inspired by ragas and he even used distinguished classical artistes like Amir Khan and D.V. Paluskar in Baiju Bawra (1952) and Bade Ghulam Ali Khan in Mughal-e-Azam (1960). Baiju Bawra (1952) demonstrated Naushad's grasp of classical music and his ability to bring it to the masses, for which he won the first Filmfare Best Music Director Award in 1954. Naushad commented on a pre-release meeting about "Baiju Bawra": “When people heard that the film would be full of classical music and ragas, they protested, ‘People will get a headache and they will run away.’ I was adamant. I wanted to change public taste. Why should people be fed what they like all the time? We presented them with music from our culture and it worked.” 

As Indian film music gradually assumed a Western bend starting in the late 1960s, Naushad came to be considered old-fashioned. Composers who could compose rock-and-roll and disco-inflected music started getting increasingly popular. Naushad was still esteemed as a maestro, but his talents were sought mostly for historical movies where traditional scores were appropriate. It can be said of Naushad that in the early days of popular cinema music in the thirties and forties he set the standards for classical and folk music that resonated with the idea of India. In short he brought out the beauty of Indian music in a short film song of a few minutes which was not an easy feat. The composers who followed him were inspired by this aspect of his compositions. 

Some Personal Quotes and Attributes

In my 62 years in the film industry, I composed music for 66 films. These days, you come across people who have done the music 200 films in two years. What I'm saying is that, we used to agonise over every tune and phrase in music, spend sleepless nights over a song, and work on it until it was perfected. And I am still looking for that perfection. We must change with the changing times, but should not lose connection with the roots. He often spent nights sleeping on the footpath opposite the Broadway theatre in Bombay, and dreamt of seeing his music played over there. Sixteen years later, he burst into tears at the premiere of Baiju Bawra (1952), at that same theatre. 

Though Naushad Ali left this world on 05 May 2006 due to Cardiac arrest, songs composed by him will live forever in the minds of music lovers. 

      Naushad on a 2013 stamp of India