Asha Bhonsle: Ten Duets, Ten Co-Singers: Part 2

When I posted this list  of ten Asha duets last week, the plan had not been to post a follow-up list as well. But then, blog readers began commenting on the post, and several of them posted songs that I really like, with playback singers I hadn’t mentioned. After all, when you’re doing a list of just ten songs, the tendency—and I admit I succumbed to this temptation—is to include your favourite songs. All the duets with Rafi, Kishore, Mukesh, et al, featured there. And those songs with these singers that didn’t actually get listed, I at least made it a point to mention.

Even when I’d posted that list, I was ruing the fact that I had still not got around to writing about Asha’s songs with, say, her sister Usha Mangeshkar. There were, in addition, a few rare songs with relatively little-known singers, too, that I had had in mind, but hadn’t written about.

So many good songs on the back burner. I decided a Part 2 was in order. So here it is. Ten duets sung by Asha Bhonsle with a fellow singer who wasn’t listed in the earlier post. As always, these songs are all from pre-1970s Hindi films that I’ve seen. These are in no particular order.

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Chitalkar Ramachandra Sings: Ten Songs

Today is the birth centenary of one of my favourite music directors, C Ramachandra: he was born a hundred years ago, on January 12, 1918, in Puntamba (Maharashtra). I won’t go into his biography, since that is something I’ve covered before on this blog, when I compiled a list of my ten favourite songs composed by C Ramachandra.

That said, I couldn’t possibly have let C Ramachandra’s centenary pass by without celebrating it in some way. So, a list of great songs C Ramachandra sang. Like SD Burman, C Ramachandra (billed often as Chitalkar, especially when he sang playback) had a slew of songs to his name as singer. Unlike SD Burman’s instantly recognizable voice, Chitalkar’s was a little more elusive—to the average listener, he can be recognized at times, but more often than not, he sounds like someone else altogether…

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Ten of my favourite string instrument songs

After I’d done my piano song posts, I began to think of other musical instruments that appear in the picturisation of songs. Songs where it’s not an orchestra (Ted Lyons and His Cubs, anyone? Or The Monkees?), but a hero or heroine, not a professional musician, being the one ‘playing’ an instrument? Guitars, I thought, would be a good place to start. A ‘guitar songs’ post. I tried by listing, off the cuff, all the songs I could remember as having a guitar-playing actor or actress. Then I went and checked on Youtube—and discovered that several of the songs I’d remembered as featuring a guitar actually featured a different string instrument: a mandolin, for example (in Tum bin jaaoon kahaan), or some even more unusual and exotic instruments.

String instrument songs: Baar baar dekho, from China Town Continue reading