No rehearsals, no retakes for Rahman

No rehearsals, no retakes for Rahman

Sanjib Guha. Mumbai



The double Oscar winning music composer AR Rahman is a huge cricket enthusiast. The BCCI-organised T20 Champions League — which was scheduled in last December and had been postponed after the 26/11 terror strike in Mumbai — had a theme song composed by Rahman in his studios in Chennai. And that's how the music maestro's innings with cricket started.
ESPN, who bought the television rights for the high-profile league, had to go through a process before the recording was done around mid-November. "Rahman was quite excited with the challenge as it was for the first time he was doing something with cricket — or sports for that matter," Nirmal Dayani, ESPN's senior director, marketing, told DNA.
According to Dayani, the entire process was a bit different. The television channel made him understand that Champions League T20 was to cricket what Rahman was to music. For Rahman, it was a process of discovery, as he went through the stages of exploration and experiment before finally arriving at a solution.
But the idea of having a theme song without lyrics was something that only Rahman could think of. He believed that the anthem didn't require any lyrics as long as it captured and amplified the passion and energy.
During the process of composing the anthem, Rahman asked for feedbacks on a regular basis perhaps to attain higher level of excellence each time. But Rahman's out-of-the-world thinking produced a unique anthem sans lyrics and that too at one shot.
Dayani explained how the score was created without any rehearsals and retakes. "After having heard the track, I requested him to do a piano version of that whenever he had time. He sat on the piano and played the track once and for all…To my astonishment that score was created and recorded in front of me at one go," he revealed.
The anthem, which has been shelved for now, is expected to hit headlines again around October once the postponed T20 Champions League takes place.