Slowly he gave me exactly what I asked for.
Otherwise it’s just his voice and the harmonium and the melody with his voice in your head. This was done to actually give me an idea as to what the song will end up sounding like. Now he records this melody properly, in his voice, and the tune is hard-core clear for me. He breaks the song into a guitar pattern, and then brings the percussion in. Then, in the studio, he gets a guitarist to sit in front of him and then he calls a drummer. How did he add flesh and blood to these skeletal structures. So you have a set of tunes (or melody lines) that you like. If I hadn’t stopped him, I would have got all my eight songs on that day itself. The second tune also came out as he put his hand on the harmonium. He puts his hand on the harmonium and there’s a tune that comes out. I had given him a pretty visual description of my songs. He’s got a small recorder into which he puts a tape, and if he likes a tune, he records that tune in his voice. We were at Prasad, in his small studio, where he sits on the floor with the harmonium, nothing else. This must have been a very different experience for you, listening to outlines of tunes first, which is how Ilayaraja works. The first question, naturally, has to be about how different it must have been.
We often find directors opting for younger composers after a while, but rarely, if ever, do we see a filmmaker from the current generation opt for a senior composer. Gautham Vasudev Menon talks to Baradwaj Rangan of ‘The Hindu’ about working with Ilayaraja for the first time…