AR Rahman Concert

Last weekend while speaking to me, my quiz team mate casually revealed he had donor passes to the ARR concert and wasn’t going since it was raining! And we were 30 mins away from the start. Eventually, I managed to convince him to change his insane decision and persist through the pouring rain for a little over 3 hours of great music spanning ARRs work in the last decade or so.

Kailash Kher, Sukhwinder Singh, Alka Yagnik, Shankar Mahadevan were all in attendance as were other stars.

The bad new first. ARRs voice live is something that you could occasionally wince at, as the man is largely untrained and his voice doesn’t have the richness that is masked with his digital mastery, but he more than makes up for it with his astounding amount of talent.

The good news - He has an amazingly strong voice much like a rock star. And he really does know how to handle an audience. He peppers the audience with other artistes and then comes back and asks whether we are enjoying the show (what you would expect the MC or RJs to ask)And he does entertain. Its only when you attend a concert of this sort (or you need to be reading Anti's blog)do you realize that ARR has been around for a while, since he first burst into mainstream Indian cinema with Roja in 1992.

ARR treated the audience to all his big hits right from Roja, Bombay, Yuva, Kisna, Lagaan, Alaipayuthey, down to Bose. There were 2 odd moments - one really jarring, the other passable. Shankar Mahadevan tried some improvisation of Humma Humma with ARR set to a classic beat before the two plunged into the expected rendition of the popular song. Remo was sorely missed. Then came the Chaiyya Chaiyya by someone whose name I didn't quite make an effort to find out. She was bad, atleast to my ear. So Sapna Awasthi may still be in demand when you want to hear the original. Madhurshree (?) managed to deliver a fine performance with the Kabhi Neem Neem song and a couple of others. I was unfamiliar with her and was quite pleasantly surprised. Shankar Mahadevan tried improvising on a couple of occasions and had genuine fun with Rahman. ARR also got someone from his Bombay Dreams project to deliver a song from the production. Sukhwinder Singh tried in vain to get the crowd going to his antics, but didn’t quite pull it off. When he stuck to his music, he was good. And for some vague reason changed clothes more than once! But the toast of the day must be raised to Sivamani who rocked. He had this 15-20 min solo to himself and he played what is known dapangutu beats, then some folk drums, then some western style percussion with one hand and African beats with the other and both set to a fast pace. And when one of the RJs thanked all people on stage, Sivamani interrupted him to remind him of the man who sets up his drums. And that must be some some task as there were atleast 50 different objects on stage. Sivamani alone made my day. He is gifted and his performance showed that.

One couldn’t really ask for more after so much music. The closure was along expected lines with Vande Mataram bringing the concert to a fitting closure under driving rain.

Sting, Mark Knopfler, Gypsy Kings, ARR, ab kya?