Nearest Neighbor – Female solo and flute

 Raja has used Janaki as his main female voice for several reasons. One of the reasons is her voice can be used as an instrument along with another musical instrument. In this post, all the songs but one are by Janaki and the musical instrument is the flute. While using female voices for humming is a very old technique, very rarely, composers have used great female voices as instruments and have demonstrated it as an orchestral element.  The female voice and the flute are close neighbors and very rarely they are placed next to each other. Of course, Raja is all about standing out from conventional thinking.

The first 100 seconds of the clip is from the song Edalolaya from the film Anveshana (Telugu 1985). The whole song is an orchestral experiment with Janaki’s voice and the flute. Some parts are arranged as musical notes sang by Janaki and others as humming by her. The flute responds to every note she sings or hums and it is a very clever use of her voice along with an unlikely neighbor, flute. Between 23 and 46 seconds, within this clip, Raja uses the keyboard as the steady background melody with Janaki and the flute as the foreground melody. The foreground melody uses a call and response technique. This is PolyCare at the next level where Raja simply replaces one of his foreground instruments with Janaki’s voice. Brilliant masterstroke!

Between 1:42 qand 2:24 seconds is from the song, Kogile Kooguvaa, from Prem Kahani (Kannada 2009). Here Raja uses Bela Shinde’s voice along with the flute and synthesized keys to place them initially farther and towards the end of this segment, brings them pretty close. 

Between 2:26 and 2:49 seconds is from the song, ‘Oru Kili Urugudhu’ from Ananda Kummi (Tamil 1982), where Raja uses two voices to simulate a flute and towards the end of the clip brings in the actual flute itself to show the tonal difference.

Let’s hear these Nearest Neighbors – Female solo and flute …