Asha disappoints with recreated ghazals

Album: "Asha", Singer: Asha Bhosle; Music recreated by Somesh Mathur

It isn't easy to recreate the immortals, especially if you belong to that haloed ilk yourself. Asha Bhosle doing the ghazal greats is not a musical accident - it's an event.

Her songs like "Aur kya ahad-e-wafaa hote hain" in "Sunny", "Kabhi kissiko mukkamal ajahan nahin milta" in "Ahista Ahista" and "Justuju jisski thi" in "Umrao Jaan" have an intoxicating effect on ghazal lovers.

Wish the same could be said about what Asha has done with the ghazal as a genre and the individual memorabilia that she has selected to re-sing on this new eagerly awaited album.

"Asha", for all the singer's indisputable virtuosity, is a bit of a damp squib. It gives the singer a lot of room to improvise but doesn't allow her to expand in directions that do her virtuosity ample, or even partial justice.

A lot of the blame for the album's failure to register must be shouldered by arranger Pandit Somesh Mathur who makes absolute changes in the orchestration, adds guitar/drums/saxophone riffs, subtracts many of the original instruments from the back-up riff to give the album a contemporary feel.

You just feel like telling Mathur to back off... No 'sax' please, we're Indians! And Asha's unalloyed throat certainly didn't need all these backups to come alive.

Left to herself, Asha would have done fabulous things to Mehdi Hassan's "Ranjish hi sahi" and Ghulam Ali's "Dil mein ek lehar si". But that's easier said than done. With a multitude of sound-enhancing devices crowding her vocals, the numbers tend to cave in even as the supple-throated songstress' voice rises.

Asha has done unoriginal songs before. She even sang her illustrious sister Lata Mangeshkar's number "Jai jai shiv shankar" in the album of R.D. Burman remixes "Rahul & I".

The songs on that album were faithful to the original. The ghazals in "Asha" take on the endurable classics. Purists will have a hard time identifying "Chupke chupke raat din" and "Ahista ahista" as the beloved numbers by Ghulam Ali and Jagjit Singh.

In a way Asha has tried to do with the originals what Sanjay Leela Bhansali succeeded in doing with "Devdas". In "Asha" there's plenty of innovation and improvisation. But these don't really allow the singer to create a graceful enough space in the soundtrack to breathe freely.

Asha's expressions in Farida Khannum's "Aaj jane ki zid na karo" and Mehdi Hassan's "Mujhe tum nazar se gira to rahe ho" are interesting, even arresting at times. But they fail to do justice to the classics. This association between the diva and the deified ditties is a disappointment.

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Asha