Devdas Soundtrack. - sound recording review

Whole Earth, Winter, 2002 by Doctor Rhythm

Ismail Darbar, music director About $6. Universal. At Indian import stores or from, for instance, www.indiaplaza.com

This is as much a film review as a music review, but see Devdas and you'll want the soundtrack, if not the DVD, to dance along to the musical numbers.

Devdas--a remake of a classic that was filmed twice before in black and white--is the most expensive and most hyped movie ever to come out of Bollywood. The hero (played by the overworked heartthrob Shah Rukh Khan) returns from England to find the girl next door has been (literally) holding a candle for him for a decade. Paro (the stunning Aishwarya Rai, an actual Miss World) is still in love with him, and once he sees her, he's hooked, but his uptight father forbids the union. Humiliated, the girl's mother marries her off to a prince and Dev goes on a bender. He's rescued for a spell by a lovely courtesan (played by talented actress Madhuri Dixit, who can actually sing as well as dance), but drinks himself to death, managing to get to his beloved's doorstep before croaking.

Yes it's a lame plot, but the sets, costumes, and choreography are superb. A dozen composers worked on the soundtrack, producing a whole range of songs, many of them about Radha and Krishna, that create an intended nontemporal quality (the extra-high women's voices do take a bit of getting used to). I chew up the bubblegum of "Maar Daala" and "Bairi Piya," with tabla and dhol underpinnings. My favorite is the drunk number "Chalak Chalak," which seems to have a tonguetwister as the lyric. You can buy this CD for $6 at Indian import stores (it seems like the right price for a CD).

Doctor Rhythm (Alastair Johnston) is a letterpress printer and a teacher of graphic design who DJs over the San Francisco radiowaves. The author of scholarly works on typography and bibliography, he has spent time in Africa, Brazil, Haiti, and other musical hotspots, and publishes a free monthly email review of world music, from which the following are excerpted. I know of no other review of music with such a Whole Earth flavor. To subscribe, write docrhythm@earthlinknet.--PW