During his initial days in Mumbai, composer S D Burman's experiments with music were hit-and-miss affairs so he decided to give up his ambition of composing for Hindi films and return to Kolkata when he was persuaded by actor Ashok Kumar to stay back.
Mr Kumar was shooting for Mashaal at the time when Burman was packing his bags to go back to Kolkata, says a new book on the iconic music director and singer Sun Mere Bandhu Re: The Musical World of S D Burman by Sathya Saran.
"Hoping to entice him to stay longer, Ashok Kumar asked the composer to create the music for Mashaal. Work had started but Mr Burman was still unhappy. He decided to hand over the baton to his assistant Manna Dey. But Ashok Kumar was persuasive and Mr Burman stayed. And changed the course of his destiny as well as that of Manna Dey," the author writes.
Another little-known fact is that among Mr Burman's assistants for Do Bhai was a musical-minded ex-army man, who would later blaze his own trail as a composer of evergreen melodies - Madan Mohan.
"It took no time for me to write the song, but a week to polish it," says Gulzar. According to Saran, Mr Burman also had a small tiff with Mr Roy over the picturisation of the song. Mr Roy had planned it as an indoor shot, while Mr Burman had created a tune that gathered the outdoors within its melody.
Mr Burman always gave simplicity in rendition great value, be it in the interpretation and unfolding of the music or the singer's rendition. Saran quotes Majrooh Sultanpuri, "Dada did not like too many instruments, he would try and use as few as possible. At some point, Pancham took on the responsibility of arranging for the orchestration, but often Dada would remove some of the musicians, saying, 'If you load a song with so much jewellery, you won't see the song at all. Take it away.' He would say, lessen a violin here, cut the percussion, things like that."
"With Raat akeli hai, S D Burman proved that Western or tribal, rural or classical, when it came to music, he was lord of them all," says Saran.
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