The Story of the 'Richly Evergreen'......(Part5)

The tripartite force - and it was a force indeed!

                                                                                    The Asha-Nayyar-Rafi combination was supremely successful starting from the mid 50’s up to the end of the 60’s. It is to be noted here that before Asha Bhonsle came along, O P Nayyar used to collaborate frequently with Shamshad Begum and Geeta Dutt for majority of his songs. The fact that Asha Bhonsle developed a style different from Lataji was good for her career; however, she still sounded similar to Geeta Dutt. Even the two had similar voice tinge. As an avid listener, I think there was a fine difference between the two voices. While Geeta Dutt was a little too aggressive in the throw of words, Ashaji was more soothing. Here, I must say that both had a brilliant sense of how to use the microphone and how to skillfully utilize the breath and emotion while recording. Both carved a new genre of playback singing. Both were legends in their own rights, with a vivid charm. It was the film “Naya Daur” and the song “Maang ke saath tumhara” that proved to be a landmark song for Asha Bhonsle and after that he became a regular in O P Nayyar’s team.

Rafiana in full swing

                                     As in comparison to Ashaji, Rafi-sahab was much more of an obvious choice to Nayyar. In those days, Rafi was exhibiting tremendous singing skills. He had a golden voice and a marvelous range. Rafi-sahab could successfully cater to the need, vision and style of different music composers and could give them the exact product that they had conceived. I mean he never gave an impression that a certain song was misfit for his voice - such was his greatness! Nayyar-sahab and Rafi-sahab both complimented each other. In other words, Nayyar-sahab’s style of music found a channel to appeal to the mass through the voice of Rafi and the latter too found a distinguishing flavor of tunes to lend his voice to, a flavor very different from the classical ups and downs of Naushad or the folk-based melody of S D Burman or the operatic simplicity of Shankar Jaikishen. The association was a memorable one and I have heard Nayyar-sahab heaping words of praise on Rafi during TV shows, and even with moistened eyes, much like his peer Naushad. There was a slight period of downtime in the association when he did songs with another great Mahendra Kapoor but it is hard to believe that there was indeed any problem between the two.

The trusted lieutenant - S.H.Bihari

                                                             O P Nayyar worked with many leading lyricists of his time; however, his association with S H Bihari was the lengthiest one in terms of number of films done together. Although he worked with several song-writers like Majrooh, Sahir, Jan Nissar Akhtar and Raja Mehdi Ali Khan, S H Bihari was the one whose words felt like the ones that are most readily and closely knit with O P’s genre of music. The meter or “matra” was sometimes contrived in his music and Bihari was most of the time up to his best to latch on to those complications in the tune. S H Bihari was one of the rare lyricists who did not really receive a lot of recognition, fame and accolades during his lifetime and one wonders what the reason was. On most of the cases, O P’s tunes were of light and romantic nature. Hence the poet, or the song-writer, used to get a good opportunity to use some similes, allegories etc along the way while writing the entire song.

[To Be Continued....]