Album Reminiscences – 3 – Madurai Mani

Raja Govindarajan has tagged me in this FB chain game of choosing 10 albums. Here is the third one.

Today I’m a Madurai Mani fanatic. In fact, one of my lifetime goals is to write a biography on Madurai Mani. I spend at least a few hours in a week discussing one rendition or the other of Ganakaldharar with my friendVishnuramprasad Vasudevan.

But it might surprise you if I said it took me several years to warm up to this great musician.

The album I share today is a LP gramophone recording from the 1960s with Vidwans T.N.Krishnan and Vellore Ramabadran. The reason I share this is because this was my first brush with MMI.

It was in 1997 and my neighbor had this tape and I cannot remember what I felt when I listened to it. It still beats me why I didn’t get completely floored when I heard this for the first time. I didn’t even bother to give this a second time listening then. I just moved on and eventually found GNB’s music.

I was completely floored by GNB’s music and the personality I imagined myself through various stories I came to know off. I went to US for my Masters Degree in 2001. I didn’t have to go to browsing centers, sharing a thirty minutes slot with two other friends just to check my emails. Nor did I have to compose emails on notepad and patiently wait for the dialup modem to make all kinds of noise and manage to send the email after three failed attempts.

I became a net addict quite fast. Internet forums and yahoogroups introduced me to several wonderful people.

In fact, Raja – who has tagged me to do this series – is a friend I met online then.

There was an e-group called cmxchange. While MP3s had come into vogue, much of carnatic music collection were still dealt in tapes. Collectors usually were discreet. Anytime, you manage to get a concert recording from a collector, you were told a hundred times not share it with anyone. These days, people often reach out to me for my collection. When I ask them, what exactly they are looking for, many times I hear them say, “Dump whatever you have in a Hard Drive”. The digitization has no doubt made life easy. But, it has, to some extent, devalued the music as well. When we dealt in tapes, we actually listened to the collections. Today I know of a few who flaunt that they have 200 concerts of MDR alone. I wonder if they will finish listening to 10% of that in their lifetime.

OK! Enough digression! Let me come back to track.
In the cmxchange group, I found Lakshmi Subramanian. He did the unthinkable!

He had not only collected hundreds of concerts over the years and documented them meticulously into excel sheets but also he had shared those in excel sheets in public as well. Perhaps, he was too frustrated scouting for the concerts that he didn’t have and their existence was maintained as a guarded secret. He opened up his collection in the exchange forum. I was thrilled for several days just looking at the endless lists of GNB concerts. I probably had 4 or 5 full length concerts of GNB then. I somehow wanted to possess the entire GNB collection of Lakshmi Subramaniam.

But there were two problems.
1. It was a exchange forum. I didn’t have anything that I could offer Lakshmi in return for the GNB concerts I wanted.
2. His collection was in tapes. That meant, even if he agreed to give me his entire GNB collection, he will have to record them on 100+ tapes. Then there was TNR, Karaikuruchi, MLV and others. I wanted their concerts as well! How on earth someone will agree to copy that many tapes and ship them?

I was waiting for an opportunity to contact Lakshmi. Vid. N.Ramani had visited our university for a performance and I managed to get a recording for that concert. I wrote to him offering him the concert recording and was hoping that he would be interested in it. He politely refused my offer but said he was happy to share from his collection. He was ready to take ten requests at a time. We started exchanging mails and quickly moved onto phone conversations. We struck a chord from day 1 and I was mostly learning from him during the long hours of conversations. He would play great pieces from his collection on the phone and I would enjoy listening to them for hours. He was ready to take ten concert requests at a time. By then, I had known other collectors in who dealt in MP3s. For some reason, many of these collectors didn’t want to deal with Lakshmi directly but were interested in specific concerts from his collections. I quickly increased my collection by getting there digitized collection in return for the concerts they wanted from Lakshmi. Lakshmi was aware of this and was keen to help me build my collection.

I must add here that Lakshmi is a Madurai Mani fanatic. He would give an arm and an eye for an MMI concert that he didn’t already possess. I was mostly “putting up” with his raving for MMI during the conversation but never actually asked him to give me a concert of MMI from his collection. Every time I sent him a request he would offer me a MMI concert and I would find a reason to turn it down. It used to frustrate him but he put up with that for a few times. After all these years, I now realize that was big concession he gave me. When it came to MMI, even the slightest of offenses would have resulted in parting ways for good with Lakshmi. For some reason, he not only put up with me but also kept on offering MMi concerts.

One day, he snapped but to my surprise he said, “you know what! I’m anyway going to send you a MMI concert over and above what you ask for this time” and said he was going to send me a radio concert with Chowdiah and Palani as accompaniments. He also mentioned that there was an out of the world rendition of ‘manasu nilpa’ in abhogi in the concert and a fabulous ‘Endukku Peddala’ to boot. I immediately started to refuse. To me, any song rendered by GNB was not worth listening to when sung by anyone else. After listening to those cascading sangatis of GNB with Lalgudi and Pazhani and those lovely swarakshara poruttams at ‘Ma Dha Manasu Nilpa’, I was definitely not open to listening to anyone else singing that song. I tried to push back. But, this was an extra tape that we sending me. i could only push him so much.
The tape arrived and I reluctantly listened to it – only to tell Lakshmi that I heard it and close the chapter. That was the day I became a MMI convert. I have never heard anything like that before. Every swara lilting with beauty. I was hating myself to admit that this rendition was becoming my favorite rendition even before I was done listening to it for the first time. The famous sarva laghu swaras finally captivated me!

By the time I visited him in Tampa – I was mad about MMI’s music. A long ride when we listened to MMI singing nereval in “ethanaiyo piravi” with Palani on the mridangam is an experience I will cherish for the lifetime.

I went back to the gramophone record much later and this time it was total bliss. Be it a six minute 78 rpm, 30 mins EP or a 4 hour concert, one element that strikes you in MMI’s rendition is him hitting the strides right from the word go!

In life, many beautiful things loose sheen over time. We get used to them and finally forget their existence. We need a fresh perspective to go back and appreciate them.

Life would be blissful if one could recreate the first time like experience every time. MMI was able to convey that ‘freedom from the known’ through his renditions. It could be the zillionth Kamboji he was rendering, he was able to approach it with the freshness of the first time.

By the time, this record was released, MMI must have sung those songs for thousands of times – yet he is able to weave his magic and give us an ecstatic experience.

Thank you Lakshmi for your patience in converting me. I’ll be indebted to you for life just for this!