RMIM Archive Article "241".
From the RMIM Article Archive maintained by Satish Subramanian
#
# RMIM Archives..
# Subject: K. L. Saigal: the pilgrim of the swara 8
#
# Posted by: ADhareshwar@WorldBank.Org (Ashok)
# Source: K. L. Saigal: the pilgrim of the swara
# Clarion Books, New Delhi, 1978
# Author: Ragava R. Menon
#
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8 babula mora
Here is a quotation:
"Let this man be careful to remember that the higher he goes
on the scale, let him become softer and softer in his touch
rather than strident.
Let him also be careful to move his voice gently from the
high notes to the lower ones, using always his vowels to
glide down, never his consonants.
Let every word be distinctly uttered, clearly understood,
and no syllable lost in transit.
If he repeats a line, let it in the repeating become more
striking than the first time, otherwise he is no singer.
He who does not know how to steal time honourably is no
singer as long he makes proper restitution of all that he
has stolen. [Something wrong in the sentence.]
Such a man will not be forgotten."
If Saigal had ever advised a young and struggling singer, these
words may have been properly used by him in his advice. For he
applied every one of these ideas in his singing style plus some
more. Yet this advice was given more than two hundred years ago
by Pier Francesco Tosi of the Bologna Philharmonic Society in his
"Observation on xxxxxx [ink blot!]. "Song." published in 1723:
the translation of the text from the original Italian is loose
and general, but the meaning leaves no one in any doubt what Tosi
meant and was telling us to do.
Whether Saigal did all this by gift or instinct is of little
importance at this point. At least by the time the world began
to hear his voice, he had developed so many facets of his nature
to such a high level of conscious capacity that he himself and
what he did with his music all seemed simple. Simplicity is the
hardest thing in the world to acquire.
All arts, all crafts, all technics and all skills are really
headed through the ultimate sophistication and complexity towards
a redeeming simplicity in their development. The saint and the
singer alike is after this state of unguarded awareness about
which religions often bear witness. Singers can do little better
than sing these truths in between the lines of their songs. No
one in recent times in the field of packed so much truth in
between the lines of his song as this man did.
Saigal died on January 18, 1946. He was forty-two years old
at the time. He was probably a diabetic from a very early age
for he suffered excruciatingly from carbuncles all his life and
used often to be in great pain. People said it was his drinking
that killed him early. But at the time he sang "jokhan robona
ami" no one could have guessed that he was in such a tearing
hurry. But the song was, for him, prophetic beyond measure. But
by the time he had sung "jab dil hi toot gaya" he was far gone
irretrievably lost to liver disease which was diagnosed as
cirrhosis.
In his last years in Bombay his voice had darkened to a warm
viola-like voice. The pitch had noticeably declined and that
silvery ring had gone. But yet when he sang that chorus "kya ham
ne bigada hai" it was the MGM lion singing, deep, resonant and
booming like the king he was. The All India Radio announced his
passing in its morning bulletin.
All these years later, at five minutes to eight in the
morning, Radio Ceylon plays a Saigal record. You can hear him in
Kabul, in Nairobi, in Kuwait, in Tangier, and Rabat. The Teheran
Radio has played his Persian _ghazals_. His voice is well-known
in Jakarta and Fiji and it is good to see his familiar figure
dressed as Shah Jahan, arranged along with other records at Sam
Goody's store in New York. On 18 January every year, the All
India Radio remembers him. Who said he is dead?
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From the RMIM Article Archive maintained by Satish Subramanian