Memories

I encountered Victor Ratnayake in Nugegoda

November 27, 2017 by admin

Iraj Weeraratne, Nugegoda, uditha, Uditha Devapriya, Victor Ratnayake

For Iraj and for Victor. For you and for me.

Three years ago, when I was happily unemployed, I was a joyful drifter, aimlessly wandering here and there. I had some money of my own (freelancing does pay, though it doesn’t pay much), enough for me to roam around and look for ways of earning some more. I remember the month. December. I remember the day. Tuesday. And I remember the appointment. A conversation with Malinda Seneviratne, at his office in Maradana. I was late, though: I needed to get a gift for someone who was to celebrate his birthday soon. Leaving Malinda, I got on the 176 bus to Nugegoda, left Maradana, and waited for my ride to end. It was about 10 in the morning.

The 176, like the 155, is one of those bus routes in this country which seem longer than they actually are. It’s also one of those buses in which the act of sitting, curiously enough, is as taxing as the act of standing. (The Rajagiriya flyover bridge, then as now, was not complete, so the strenuous and demanding ride was made even strenuous and demanding.) One journey is enough; two journeys are too much; and three, if one is to make through them, are so terrible that the only refreshing fact about the end of the third is the hope that one never wades through a fourth. This was the first time, in a long time, I had been on the 176. When I got down near the Nugegoda Station, I was hit with so much silence that I wondered where I was.

We happy unemployed drifters have a prerogative you unhappy workaholics do not: that of experiencing and encountering a neighbourhood, a community, even an entire city when it’s least busy outside, when the yuppies are at their offices and the only people walking on the road are drifters, children, housewives, and beggars. Station Lane, which is where the 176 I was in stopped, opened to one such city. Apart from a few shops and a few lottery ticket booths, the entire area from the lane to the station was empty. The perfect getaway for the happy drifter, I thought to myself.

And then, as I was revelling in the fact that I was unemployed and still studying for my law degree, the fact that being alive meant being free of any responsibility towards seniors and co-workers, the loudspeakers along Station Lane blared. At that time of day my ears are accustomed to hearing Sangeeth Wijesuriya (because drifters like me love Sangeeth: he has a voice which reminds you of greasy garages and sweaty palms in the hottest afternoons and the most humid evenings, a voice which has gone by unrecognised, even by those who enjoy it). This time around, however, it was a different vocalist. Victor Ratnayake. And a different song. “Paawe Wala”. When that different song and that different vocalist blared out of those loudspeakers, the ticket-booth owners and the drifters and the women, in a scene that would have made Robert Wise proud (perhaps I’m being too optimistic here, but still) sang along.

Victor Ratnayake has that supreme ability of enflaming you, no matter where you are, with his voice. He is the opposite of Amaradeva in that sense, because Amaradeva is didactic even in his most light-hearted songs, while Victor is only didactic off the air, when he’s speaking to people like you and me; on air, he’s a romantic. “Paawe Wala”, however, was not written for him; it was written for Mervyn Perera, whose voice was closer to Victor’s than anyone else’s. The last SA Prasangaya, which I attended two years before despite a fit of depressive anger, unveiled with him remembering the man who graciously conceded that song. “I am a Buddhist, he was a Christian. I wish that he attains the supreme bliss of Nibbana,” he told us after he performed it. If I can’t think of another vocalist who can inspire so much in us that we forget our worries and sing about love in the middle of the road and during the middle of the day without realising how self-consciously young we become, it’s because there isn’t one.

Even at this stage in his life and career, the man reminds you of how young you once were. This has as much to do with his voice as it does with the two lyricists he has resorted to the most frequently: Premakeerthi de Alwis and Sunil Ariyaratne, both of whom wrote copiously on love. He doesn’t really care what “styles” he goes for: jana gee or Karnatic, slow or fast paced, his compositions reverberate with the kind of liveliness which his performances do. “He made me dance through ‘Kundumani’,” Malinda wrote of Premakeerthi. That sense of immediacy comes through the composition, that honest-to-ethnic-origin melody, as well. What Victor’s work leaves behind, for you to savour, is neither aggressive nor didactic, but it isn’t completely romantic either. It’s a different form of romanticism: rather conservative, never completely free. Almost as though he’s afraid of reminding us of our youth. As though we’ll go mad, and depressed, if we are reminded of it in the first place.

Some of his best songs transcend that conservative streak and yield to our deepest impulses. That’s where Victor is at his loveliest, I’d like to think. “Sanda Hiru Tharu” has him sing about the collective, secular, extraordinary joy of samsaric living; “Sara Sonduru” has him and Nanda Malini explore the poignancy of winning and then losing a first love; “Mihiren Ma Dinu” has him reflect on the first impressions of passing beauty, faintly registered, never rationalised. The latter two, incidentally, were composed by Premasiri Khemadasa; Victor never sang Khemadasa’s compositions in the SA Prasangaya, nor did he record them again. He has his reasons, but listening to them today makes one wish that he revisited them. They are some of the most innocently lovely works I have come across in our sarala gee tradition. And not for no reason: if a lesser vocalist had sung them, they would have lost that delicate welter of innocence and set off lewd speculations about who was singing about whom.

It has been said of Elvis and Hendrix that young women wanted to love them and young men wanted to be like them. If I sound blasphemous there, rest assured I didn’t say it: Professor Carlo Fonseka did, five years ago around the time of the last SA. Now Professor Fonseka has a habit of comparing the artist to the most primitive sample of our species. He did that with Malini Fonseka, he did that with Victor Ratnayake. To him, the singer and the actor is first and foremost a man or a woman.

“It is reasonable to suppose that a tribe strongly bonded together by music will have the edge in the struggle for existence over a less musical tribe,” he wrote. Had I written it, with my deplorable understanding of both music and biology, I would have been put down as a heretic. Such heretical thoughts belong to those who have specialised in the fields which produce them. In that sense the Professor is right. Victor Ratnayake is (almost) everything that Elvis and Hendrix were. But that’s not his real achievement. His real achievement has been his ability to be an Elvis, a Hendrix, a Robert Plant, within the confines of our closely knit, repressive, and traditionalist society. Perhaps that’s why he’s so rousingly didactic outside, and so rousingly romantic inside. We all operate on such a dichotomy, after all.

And perhaps that’s why we love him so much, yet still feel uneasy about loving and giving into what we think he stands for (which, incidentally, happens to be what he DOES stand for). We are afraid of expressing our love, forgetting all the while that what we misconceive as love wasn’t what most of our ancestors thought it to be. The at times wildly divergent reactions the man gleaned from us, his single biggest audience, last year and this year, indicates that he is what he sings, and not what he says. Outside he can rabble about the importance of staying true to the past while the contemporary singer bemoans it, but the truth is that he makes us fall in love with our younger selves in far greater ways than that contemporary singer. So when that singer tries to get even with the man in the most imaginative way he THINKS is possible, he is both at the peak of his popularity and at the receiving end of the most intense vitriol he can inspire. He has defiled the deified. Done what he should not have done.

Cary Grant, the most romantic of all romantic screen personalities the world ever knew, once said that even he wanted to be Cary Grant. It took a great many decades for him to become himself. Men were afraid of him and wanted to emulate him; they could never be him. Victor Ratnayake has always been like that. He inspires both infatuation and confusion, on our part and on his own terms. He speaks for what went by, yet sings of what is. He is caught in the past, yet transfixed on the present. It’s tough to come up with another vocalist, another artiste, who thrives and flourishes on such a strange, oxymoronic combination of reverence and daring. People can go on hoping that they are less like him when it comes to being young, being themselves. At the end of the day, however, when they discover that he is, in fact, more of what they want to be, and much more of what they will never be, they will parody him using all sorts of ways: the media, the blogosphere, YouTube. They will fail, not because they haven’t tried, but because in emulating and parodying him, they are emulating and parodying that strange mixture of nostalgia and youth he lives on. The truth is that he’s both nostalgia and youth. The truth is that no parodist is going to change that.

Written for: Daily Mirror, October 24 2017

By Uditha Devapriya

T.M. jayarathne (fragmenteyes.blogspot.com)

T. M. Jayaratne: The man behind the voice

November 14, 2017 by admin

C. de S. Kulathilaka, K. A. W. Perera, Kandy, Premasiri Khemadasa, SLBC, T. M. Jayaratne, Uditha Devapriya

I first encountered T. M. Jayaratne through the films of K. A. W. Perera. I never bothered to check out his other work because, for me, he was at his best when he was crooning about love, be it young, requited, spurned, or revived. The themes these movies evoked, I felt, were most sincerely articulated by his voice. It wasn’t until much later that I realised that he had forayed into other productions, that he led other lives, and that like all such artistes from his time he couldn’t be compartmentalised. I met him about a month ago. Here’s an attempt at a sketch.

T. M. was born in the village of Dodanwala near Kandy in 1944. He was firstly sent to St Anthony’s College in Katugastota, where he forayed into Western music. “What we did for our music class was gather around our teacher and her piano and sing those usual childhood melodies, like ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ and ‘Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree.’ Not surprisingly, we became more inclined towards Western music.”

Of his elders at St Anthony’s, T. M. remembers the Rector, Reverend Father Rosati, with unmistakeable nostalgia. A graduate from the University of London, Father Rosati always sought to endear himself to the students. “We adored him. In fact you couldn’t escape him. He used to visit our classes and ask us questions. If we answered him correctly, he’d praise us and give us lozenges. After handing those lozenges, he’d smile at the others and say, ‘And for those who didn’t get the correct answer, please don’t get annoyed with me, I have some for you as well.’ That he was loved by us was only to be expected.”

T. M.’s father, a government servant, had been prone to those compulsory transfers which “afflict” such workers in general. Barely two years after T. M. was enrolled at St Anthony’s, for instance, he had been requested to leave for Nuwara Eliya. Since it meant finding another school for his son, he decided to travel alone. “He’d leave for work on Monday morning and come back on Friday evening to spend the weekend with us. He endured this routine for two years, after which he got another transfer, this time to Anuradhapura. He pushed for a delay. He got it delayed for two years.”

Once those two years were up, predictably, the transfer request was renewed. “We needed to act fast. There was an aunt of mine who lived in Kurunegala. Father got himself a transfer there. I was taken from St Anthony’s and put into Maliyadeva College.” He entered Grade Seven after the switch.

So how had things been at Maliyadeva? “It wasn’t easy to get used to the shift,” T. M. remembers, “In hindsight, I believe that was because of the kind of culture we had at St Anthony’s. Lessons were always conducted in English, though elsewhere we spoke in Sinhala. Maliyadeva was more indigenous, more sensitive to our culture. English was limited to one subject. I realised this was true even in the way music was taught. There were no nursery rhymes. Only ragas and Hindustani melodies.”

It’s probably a sign of the connoisseur in the man, but he doesn’t take this as a license to bemoan what had been taught at St Anthony’s. “We loved the melodies we grew up with there. If you think about it, there’s really no difference between the ‘Do Re Mi’ I had absorbed and the ‘Sa Ri Ga Ma’ I was absorbing now. I believe that helped me appreciate both the East and the West.” This, incidentally, had been supplemented by the senior music master at Maliyadeva, K. M. Dayapala.

Apparently Dayapala had encouraged him and his friends to sit for certain external music exams while pursuing their studies. T. M. remembers him as a persistent teacher who nevertheless strived to keep his students a cut above the rest. That explains why he pushed them to get through all three stages of that exam, conducted by the Gandharva Sabha and held in Kandy. They were all based on two categories: Vocal and Instrumental. With respect to the latter, Dayapala initiated young T. M. into the violin.

The exams ended. The results came. While the University entrance exams were around the corner, a gazette notification calling for applications from those who aspired to teach music was published. Dayapala requested his students to sit through the University entrance and apply immediately afterwards.

Father Rosati(fragmenteyes.blogspot.com)

Having done just that, T. M. was called to and subsequently interviewed at the Education Department in Kollupitiya. Four weeks later, he was called again along with three women. “I thought that the others had been swept off and this was to select the cream of the crop. Daunted, I abandoned any hopes and illusions I had of becoming a teacher. Imagine how amazed and excited I was when the Director informed me that I had been appointed to a school in Colombo!” This was in 1966.

On September 7 that year, he was posted to Hewawitharana Maha Vidyalaya Rajagiriya, where he taught for the next 26 years. Coincidentally, he was appointed the same day Victor Ratnayake (Aththalapitiya Maha Vidyalaya in Bandarawela), Sanath Nandasiri (Uhana Maha Vidyalaya in Ampara), Mervin Perera (Kohombara Maha Vidyalaya in Ampara), Shelton Perera (Sri Pada Maha Vidyalaya in Hatton), and Sarath Dassanayake (Niwaththakachethiya Maha Vidyalaya in Anuradhapura) were. “Back then I only knew Victor Ratnayake. All our careers converged frequently thereafter, not surprisingly.”

While wading through his job, T. M. would get involved with various stage dramas and concerts which supplemented his income (about 200 rupees). “I would get up to 20 rupees a show,” he smiles, “Not much by today’s standards, but a lot back then considering that my rent was 55 rupees a month!” Those shows, moreover, got him into a vivida prasangaya organised by the Teachers Training College in Maharagama, where he was compelled to perform in place of a singer who hadn’t turned up.

The organiser of that prasangaya, C. de S. Kulathilaka, was subsequently appointed as the Head of the Folk Music Research Unit at the SLBC. He had been impressed with T. M.’s voice, so soon afterwards he took him into the Unit to “perform” refined, accompanied versions of various folk songs he was tasked with recording from across the country. “One of the songs I performed, ‘Badda Watata Sudu Mora Mal’, was heard by a man who called the SLBC, asked after me, and learnt that I taught at a school which neighboured his house. I started working with him soon after.”

That man, who’d end up as his most frequent collaborator, was Premasiri Khemadasa, whose association with T. M. deserves an entire chapter. Spatial constraints prevent me from delving any further, however, so I think it best to get a summing up of arguably our most versatile composer from the 20th century.

“He got me into film music. My first film song with him was for Lester James Peries’ Desa Nisa (‘La Hiru Dahasak’), followed by K. A. W. Perera’s Nedeyo and Janaka saha Manju, the latter of which got me a Presidential Award as the Best Playback Singer for ‘Ko Ma Pathu.’ I ended up with a horde of directors from both the commercial and non-commercial sectors, among them Dharmasena Pathiraja.”

What of Khemadasa the man? “He was quite mercurial. If he wanted something out of you and you didn’t deliver, he could get belligerent. He often was, and he often lost his temper, but he’d immediately cool down and pat your back. With a horde of violinists tutored in Western classical music, among them Eileen Prins and Douglas Ferdinands, he revolutionised Sinhala music as we know it. In this he wasn’t trying to ‘Westernise’ us: he didn’t care if we had to ‘import’ bricks from England, as long as it helped us build the Dalada Maligawa properly. He was a marvel to work under and work with, to be honest.”

So what of T. M.’s career as a teacher? “I was briefly employed as an Assistant Director in the Aesthetics Division of the Ministry of Education when W. J. M. Lokubandara was in charge of the subject. After some time, however, I got tired. So after Lokubandara was succeeded by Richard Pathirana, I tendered my resignation and sought employment as a teacher at Sacred Heart College in Rajagiriya, less than a kilometre from my earlier school. I taught for five years there, and then retired.”

Looking back, it’s quite evident that the man’s career has been prolific. When I put to him that his time would have been qualitatively different to ours in terms of the interrelationships between the composer, the lyricist, and the performer, he agrees and says, “Back then there was a sense of unity. Quality had to be in top form. Today you have digitalised the process: if you get your recording wrong, you can always rely on software to correct it. What gets ‘absented’ there is spontaneity. And sincerity.”

Speaking for myself, I agree. Perhaps it’s a testament to T. M. Jayaratne that he has given us what he could, the way he could, sensitively, sincerely, and spontaneously. He has not been unsuccessful, I know.

Written for: Daily Mirror, June 6 2017

By Uditha Devapriya

Amaradeva: the Voice of the Nation for the Nation

November 13, 2017 by admin

Uditha Devapriya, W. D. Amaradeva

ගංගා තරංග රාව දී රිදී වනින්
මල් පිපී කුලින් කුලේ හැපී
ගායනා කරන්නේ ආකාශයේ නැගී
වීරයින්ගෙ ඒ යශෝ ගීතයයි…

His songs roll off the tongue easily, as though their lyrics were stuck in our throats and needed his melodies to be unleashed. They are addressed to us, the collective “we”, the entire country, in ways few singers have or ever will. There must be a secret to this, and I don’t deny that, but the truth of the matter is that he has tapped into the collective unconscious of the nation remarkably well. Wherever he has been and whatever he has contributed has been etched across our minds forever. He is immortal, in whatever he has sung and whatever he has written.

He is Amaradeva.

I remember arguing with a music lover over the “ultimate” aim of a song once. He put it to me that music (and indeed art) will be vindicated only when it runs parallel with the “truth”. I asked him to elaborate on this. He explained. Truth, according to him, was political, and hence defied the “saundarya” (aesthetic) quality music is filled with. He argued that songs would “dig” into us only as long as they drifted away from what he called the “indifference of the aesthete”. He was an activist. A connoisseur. A fiery critic.

I begged to differ, needless to say. I told him that as long as songs were made to be reflective in an aesthetic way, and as long as songs which talked about political realities were aesthetically crafted, they would gain popular appeal. Otherwise, they would be so specific to the time and place they were made in that they would lose popularity as time passed. I brought up some singers. He brought up some singers. We argued. Heavily.

Then we got to Amaradeva. The man quietened down. Quickly. I didn’t even have to prove what I was saying. And I won that day. Why?

I wish I knew.

There are some songs which remain alive in our memory no matter what. There’s a reason for this, obviously. Perhaps they dig deep into the reserves of our minds in a way no political song ever can. They are memorable. Lovable. Poetical. And so, those who criticise them as being too indifferent, too aesthetically crafted, are not telling the whole story. They are partial. What they say and think, hence, cannot last. Not for long.

Amaradeva’s songs cut across any divide, real or imagined. They at once beckon what we secretly nurture in ourselves. “Sasara Wasana Thuru”, for example, reflects our collective wish to be born in this country, frail and fragile though it is, over and over again. It is our “pathuma”, our wish, that we are brought up on this soil and return to it even when our remains disappear. Yes, it’s a collective wish. The same kind of wish Amaradeva sings about in countless other songs, penned by him or by other illustrious lyricists, prime among them Mahagama Sekara.

It’s not just songs of course. The true worth of the man, I feel, is to be seen in how he has imbibed different styles and idioms to present a truly “Sri Lankan” music. Take those films he has scored, for instance. I remember the first theme of his I listened to. It was from Gamperaliya. I remember the opening sequence of that film, the music tuned perfectly to a potter ambling his way along the Southern coast of Koggala. There came a point in that film when its theme took on a life of its own and exemplified a nostalgic attitude to the way of life it was portraying, something the critic Philip Cooray noted when he wrote just how dirge-like Amaradeva’s score was.

There were other films, other scores. There was Delovak Athara, a world away from Gamperaliya in terms of mood, scored completely by a Western orchestra. Amaradeva’s theme for that film was unique. Unsurpassable. In its orchestration, its mood and texture, I realised at once how eclectic, how flexible, the man was in his ability to weave together different musical traditions together. This and nothing more accounted for my love for his music. And songs.

He didn’t do it all alone, by the way. There were songwriters, as I pointed out before. There were also filmmakers, whose vision he would perhaps absorb when scoring their works. I haven’t come across very many Sinhala films to identify what would constitute the best musical score, but Thunman Handiya came very close to it. There was that same nostalgia, that same bittersweet dirge, which went in line with the film’s story. I wasn’t surprised by the fact that Mahagama Sekara had directed it. Yes, Sekara. The “gee potha” (“book of verse”) to Amaradeva’s “mee vitha” (“glass of wine”).

I haven’t met him personally. Regrettably. Still, I have come to terms with the fact that one does not need to meet him to savour him. His attitude to music is at once recognisable in any of his songs. To him, and I’m pretty sure of this, music cannot be defined. It cannot be put down in words, as a novel or poem can, and it cannot be replaced by textbooks or academic treatises. He has written of how he has made communicating his innermost feelings through music his “jeevana pranidhana” (life mission). Nothing could be truer. I have heard the man more than I have read him. He is music exemplified. He doesn’t need a biographer. His voice and melodies are his life.

This isn’t all. At a time when trends change and change fast, his is the voice of sanity that prevails. I’ve talked with friends of all races, of all religions, be they Muslim, Tamil, or Burgher. They all love him. They have made it a point to sing one of his songs whenever chance permits, the most popular being “Ratna Deepa Janma Bhumi” (for some reason). They have all committed his lyrics to memory, probably more so than those of any other artist dead or alive. I can’t think of any other singer who has inspired my countrymen this much. Maybe Sunil Santha, or even C. T. Fernando. I don’t know.

Each of his songs pithily embodies a human condition. “Nim Him Sewwa” speaks to the lover in us, hoping that one day she who is sought will return to us, forever. “Ran Dahadiya” is about the sweat and toil, the dignity, of the goviya who sustains us in a way we will never be able to pay back. “Sannaliyane” is about the inevitable vicissitudes faced by a weaver who weaves for the living and the dead. “Siripa Piyume” tunes in perfectly with the pilgrim’s yearly progress to the Holy Peak of Samanalakanda (Adam’s Peak). They are timeless, true, but are also ingrained with a Sinhala Buddhist ethos which at once cuts across to every community in our land.

He’s much more than a singer or composer. I don’t need to write down his CV for you. It’s there for everyone to see. He was there when Queen Elizabeth wanted a national anthem for the Maldives. He was there in the Philippines when he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay award. He was there, with his beloved wife adding to what he said and sang by his side, one month ago, at Ananda College. He was there, everywhere. We saw him, and when we did, a kind of hush came over us. That hush I’m yet to see with another singer or artist, whether here or elsewhere.

The truth is, and this I’m sure of, that he is a national force. He remains alive in us and in the memory of those who cherish him. If it’s about bringing together different communities, be it on either side of the racial or religious divide, no greater unifying force can be found. For he has touched what academic theses and political frameworks cannot: that timeless, space-less wish which resides in every human being: the wish to capture emotion and give it to the world (as he put it once) with no antipathies to any community. He is a communicator, a tool for harmony, and wherever he may be, he exudes that charm and humility which immediately draw us, whoever we are, to him.

He is Amaradeva. A Voice of the Nation, for the Nation. He turns 87 today. May we all put our hands together. May we all wish him: “Chiran Jayathu!”

Written for: Ceylon Today ESCAPE, December 5 2014

By Uditha Devapriya

Amaradeva: a name for everything that is our little island

November 7, 2017 by admin

Classical, Malinda Seneviratne, W. D. Amaradeva

There are rain clouds, not too dark and not threatening. It might rain later. There was rain last night. Tomorrow, there will be other clouds of similar shade. Non-threatening for a while. There might be rain. The city pulsated in rhythms acquired over the years. In some village in the Dry Zone, there are children at play. The potter is at his wheel. Someone, somewhere is listening to music. The country called Sri Lanka in determination and resilience, hope and foreboding, meanders through the hills and vales of joy and sorrow at a pace that suits her people. Sounds of yesterday are heard now and will be heard tomorrow. And through it all a silence that is strangely also a song. A sad song. Amaradeva is no more

Pundit W.D. Amaradeva, known in an earlier avatar as Wannakuwatta Waduge Don Albert Perera, born in Moratuwa on the fifth day of December in the year 1927. Don Girinoris Perera and Maggie Veslina Mendis may never have imagined that their sixth and youngest child would, almost 89 years later, make music so silent and so poignant that it matched and in many ways surpassed everything he did with voice. Amaradeva breathed his last a few hours ago. The nation skipped a heartbeat. Breaths drawn were held for a moment longer than usual and then released as a collective sigh.

How can one speak of an incomparable voice that will not sing again? What do we say of a man who left us speechless with his songs? Those who want appropriate words to articulate their respective sorrows, their gratitude and sense of loss can of course delve into the lyrics. Song titles alone would yield enough lines to pick from. But that’s not him. That’s his friends, as gifted with word as he was with voice: Mahagama Sekera, Madawala S Ratnayake, Dalton Alwis, Chandraratne Manawasinghe, Ajantha Ranasinghe, Arisen Ahubudu, K.D.K. Dharmawardena, all of whom have passed on as has Prof Nandadasa Kodagoda (one of several one-lyric contributors), and among the living the highly accomplished but most infrequently recognized Sunil Sarath Perera, not forgetting Ratna Sri Wijesinghe and the more ‘present’ Prof Sunil Ariyaratne.

He will no doubt be remembered for offering his amazing voice to equally amazing lyrics, but what singles him out will always be the voice. And as he often said, the music was only carried by the voice — it was born and nurtured in heart and mind. Every word, every syllable and the spaces between were heart-made and mind-nurtured and that what sets him apart. His heart and mind were made of this nation in all its glory, all its inadequacies, and it held everyone cutting across every conceivable distinction. Amaradeva cleared the high noted of our multiple histories and held the integrity of the deep foundations of our cultural ethos. That’s how he became and for a long time will remain the voice of our nation.

Time will pass and his name will pass into the many names among the forgotten in the birth-decay-death of our common human condition, but there will be days, now and for a long time to come, when Amaradeva will be present and ready for renewal and rediscovery, endowed with history and heritage giving us in his own indescribable ways the forgotten yesterdays and inhabitable tomorrows.

There can be no short tribute. And no long tribute will be long enough. It is tempting to draw from one of the hundreds of songs that many of us grew up with, many of us were consoled by in times of grief, many of us were lifted by for countless reasons, but that would be disservice to both singer and lyricist.

For this reason, I choose the words scripted for a TV show on Amaradeva. They were written by Bandula Nanayakkarawasam who, interestingly, had just one ‘Amaradeva Song’ to his credit, never recorded but sung by the maestro on May 18, 1989 when Amaradeva’s classic book ‘Nada Sittam’ was launched.

This is what Bandula wrote:

ගම අමතක වීද ඔහුගෙන් විමසන්න

නගරය මග හැරුනිද ඔහු සොයා යන්න

රට අමතක වීද ඔහු ඇති බව අදහන්න

ගහ-කොළ, ඉර-හඳ, ඇළ-දොළ, සමුදුර, කුරුළු-ගී

ඈ නෙක දියදම් අරුම නොපෙනී නොඇසී ගියේද

ඔහු ඇසි දිසි මානයේ රැඳෙන්න

මේ පුංචි කොදෙව්වේ, මව් දෙරණේ

මේ සියල්ල ඔහුය

‘If you’ve forgotten the village, ask him

If you are lost in a city, go find him

If you forgot the nation, believe that he lives

The trees, the sun and moon, the ocean, bird song…

These and other enchanting things……..

should you not see them, should you not hear

Go stand before him, stay within the circle of his gaze.

In this tiny island, in our motherland

He alone is all these things.”

My friend Nishad Handunpathirana who knows much more about music than those who make knowing-claims and therefore, perhaps, says little, said a few words: ‘He was our Tagore’. Perhaps that’s one way of putting it. Another way is possible, Bandula has shown. He was Amaradeva. Ours.

There is silence amid the clutter of sound. It’s the silence of a singular passing. The voice of the nation has gone silent. And strangely, in this world made of transience, it would probably linger. More tenderly. Yes, softer still.

This article was first published in the ‘Daily Mirror’ (November 4, 2016).

For Clarence Wijewardena: Soaking it all in

November 6, 2017 by admin

clarence wijewardena, Premasiri Khemadasa, Sinhala Pop, Uditha Devapriya

Young people revel in being philistines not because their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles don’t understand them (to be sure, they don’t), but because they want to show that they care, that they understand what their elders want them to understand. Some of the greatest art was born out of that kind of philistinism. And some of that philistine art has survived widespread censure. But the philistinism of the past was conditioned by an important fact. That fact was, simply, that young people knew what they were up against and had an underlying motive to please and to enthral.

The young of today are complacent, smug, passionate, and to an extent they at least try to please us. But the art they churn out can hardly be called art. They have the talent and the raw craftsmanship but they don’t have what it takes to convert that into something meaningful, something artistically fulfilling. When was the last time we heard a song which didn’t croon about love, be it imagined, lost, regained, lost again, or lost forever? When was the last time we saw a film which thrived without those Antonioni-inspired profundities that are so symbolically banal that when they actually didn’t mean anything, they are interpreted to mean something?

The problem with these cultural revolutionists is that they try to transform their common experiences into works of art they THINK we’ll take to. (For the record, of course, we don’t.) They feel so strongly that their experiences are enough, that their sense of daring will magically do the rest of the work. Depending on how you view it, this can be a sign of their laziness or convictions, and if it is the latter, those convictions of theirs aren’t really enough to convince us. Now my point here is that for any art to prosper, in any society, and for the popular to cohabit with the arty, the performer must be aware of and alive to his society. That’s what enriched our purveyors of pop culture: the H. D. Premaratne of Sikuruliya and Apeksha and the man who composed the music for both those movies, Clarence Wijewardena.

The two most discernible and easily identifiable points about a Clarence Wijewardena composition are that, one, it tells a story or at least has a story behind it, and two, it empowered a particular social milieu, middle class and demarcated as the petit bourgeoisie. Ajith Samaranayake in a tribute to Camillus Perera surmised that this bourgeoisie (or lumpen proletariat) had evolved into a special subclass on their own terms. It was that subclass which provided grist to Clarence’s work, which sought to bring together the sarala gee tradition of Amaradeva and the baila-calypso tradition of Wally Bastians, Desmond Kelly, Neville Fernando, and C. T. Fernando.

Clarence spoke or rather wrote and made others sing about the foibles of ordinary individuals, the Mangos and the Kalu Maamas who found life so mundane that they just had to make it interesting, if not colourful. This was reflected in even the instruments that the Moonstones, his first band, operated on: like the Beatles, they included the sitar alongside the guitar. Elsewhere Khemadasa was doing roughly the same thing, compounding the guitar and the piano with the sitar, the tabla, the violin.

Khemadasa took it upon himself to interpret Western chords and melodies to a discerning local audience. But that discerning audience was also discriminating, and belonged to the crowd which was fixated on the classically romantic. Clarence was not a romantic in any classical sense: his task was to refine, to readapt, and to interpret a form of music (baila and calypso) which had been disparaged by the same milieu that produced it. In doing that he wasn’t limited by the parameters of that genre, of course: neither the 6/8 beat that baila thrived on nor the deft interplay of words reflected in its lyrics. Added to this was another point, as important, as relevant.

The “low key” pop quality of much of Clarence’s work (regardless of whether they were written by him) was not really low key the way baila was. As I noted in my tribute to Anton Jones, baila lyrics celebrated a certain kind of freedom that subsisted on a happy-go-lucky, careless lifestyle. In “Mama Enne Dubayi Rate Indala” M. S. Fernando epitomises this attitude of carelessness rather well. You don’t come across that freewheeling carelessness in Clarence’s work, if at all because while they celebrated a freewheeling lifestyle, that didn’t thrive on a self-indulgent ethic.

His most suggestive, if not provocative, songs – like Mango Kalu Nande and Mame Kalu Mame – only hint at such an ethic. In this he was probably reflecting the milieu of those who doted on these songs, tempered by a middle class worldview, conservative, at times even puritanical, yet aspiring for more than what they had. They were not the kind of people that moralists would have deplored, but the kind that hinged uncomfortably on such a milieu. Ignored and neglected by nearly every artist here, they would eventually become Clarence’s biggest audience. That almost all of them hailed from the same locales which nurtured baila – Moratuwa, Negombo, Chilaw – was to be expected. They were overtly enraptured by baila, yet covertly disdainful of its celebration of self-indulgence; consequently, they were relieved at a man who reconciled the best elements of that genre with the qualities which they, as a collective, embodied. I fervently believe that was Clarence’s biggest strength.

It’s a curious interplay of love and hate, of sarcasm and infatuation, which is to be found in many of his songs. But while his early work celebrated this at times contradictory fusion of opposites, his later work, in the seventies and eighties, sought to do away with it. Like most artists who mellowed, matured, and grew wiser with the years, Clarence seemed here to have wanted to assert life as it was, without that streak of self-indulgence. To me, this is what explains the eventide quality of his later work – Atha Ran Wiman, Piyamba Yanawa Ma Akasaye, Sihina Lovak Dutuwa Mathakayi – eventide because when you listen to them, you feel as though they were composed just so to be sung at twilight, at dusk, when you look back on the day which went by and wanted to be happy at the fact that you achieved something, anything, in that day.

In the end he took an entire career to celebrate what we, his greatest admirers, had been celebrating every day. He became alive to that eventide welter of life, in which all our sorrows and defeats and conquests congealed into a dusk which we all went to, forgetting enmities and realising that we were all in it, to win or to lose, together.

මේ ලොවින් එ‍හා සිටන්
ඈත ලෝකයෙන් ඇවිත්

In short, the composer got us to look forward to another tomorrow by closing in on today, when earlier he got us to remain transfixed on a seemingly eternal today.

ඔබේ සුරතල් මුහුණ බලන්නට මම හරි ආසයි
ඔබේ බොළඳ කතා අසන්නට මට හරි ආසය

And in the end, his work, his songs, kept us alive not just to today and tomorrow, but to yesterday. The same yesterday he adorned and yes, resurrected. For us.

Cowboys and Cowboy Songs

August 17, 2017 by admin

American Plantation and Cowboy Songs, Cowboy Songs, Cowboys, Plantation Songs, Priya, Priya Peiris

American Plantation and Cowboy Songs

There are many different categories and genres of popular songs coming from the bygone era having endured the test of time as all time favorites. These ever popular songs are referred to by us as ‘vintage songs ‘, ‘standards’, ‘evergreens’, ‘golden oldies’, ‘old favorites’, etc.

In Sri Lanka, the folk cultured in a western environment love these old songs. They could be further classified to different segments – such as cowboy favorites, plantation songs, Dixieland hits, Negro spirituals, calypsos, songs from the British isles, war time hits, barber shop songs, international standards etc. All such songs basically fit into the common idiom of old favorites or golden oldies.

At this moment I am sharing a few facts about two of the above-mentioned categories of songs – namely cowboy songs and plantation songs – two of the popular genres of music and song.

Cowboys and Cowboy Songs

Most of us have heard about cowboys. I recall as a young schoolboy how excited and fascinated we were to hear about cowboys or see them in the movies. Both cowboy songs and movies were very popular then, and its charm has certainly never dwindled but gained immense popularity and acclaim all around the world ever since. In Sri Lanka, these songs are loved, adored and venerated especially by the older folk, who grew up in the midst of these songs and movies.

Cowboys in Reality

It is important to bear in mind that the cowboy story is two-fold. There are

(a) the real cowboys, and
(b) the fantasy cowboys in the movies.

The real American cowboy is an animal herder who tends cattle in the ranches of the prairie grasslands of North America – traditionally on horseback. The cowboy culture still exists in Texas (known to be the cowboy capital of the world), Kansas, Utah, Iowa, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Florida and Louisiana. These cowboys are physically able-bodied adolescents with a knack for smart colorful clothes, girlfriends, and gun culture etc. just as the movies depict!

The golden era of cowboys is considered as the period between 1866 to 1886 which is regarded as the era of the ‘open ranch’ or the ‘cattle drive’ era, when cattle had to be moved in great numbers as one herd to distant railheads to be taken for shipment, by the cowboys on horseback, due to the turbulence of the civil war.

Cowboys in the Movies

The real life cowboy story is agricultural in nature and of American heritage. Therefore, cowboys that we are talking about now are the film idols who portrayed the life style of the real ones – of course, with fiction and a lot of drama thrown in, to keep the movie goer in suspense…. and how well they succeeded in doing this!

Inspiration for Filmmaking

The cowboy culture was so appealing and magnetic that it is amazing how it inspired moviemakers to use it to their liking. Outlaws, bandits, drunkards, ambushes, vendettas, rattle-snakes, cattle, robbery, horse-riding, gun culture, love and women, storms, lonely nights, campfires, music and song of real cowboy life projected and provided an ideal setting and background for successful and exciting movie scripts. As a result, movie legends and many hundreds of cowboy songs were gifted to the world.

Cowboy Singers and Songs

Cowboy movies and songs became one of the most popular genres of music and arts around the world. They were the rage during the 1950/60 period.

The best-known cowboy film idol and singer (among a galaxy of other legendary stars) was Roy Rogers known as the ‘King of the Cowboys’. He was the idol and hero to every youngster all around the world (more about him at a later date).

Don’t Fence Me In, Home on the Range, Cattle Call, Red River Valley, My Rifle, My Pony and Me, Rose of San Antone, Roll Along Blue Shadows, Happy Trails, Lonely River are a few of the all time cowboy favorites.

Apart from Roy Rogers, perhaps the other best known cowboy film idol and singer was Gene Autry. We have also heard of other cowboy singers such as Jimmy Rogers, Tex Ritter and latterly Hank Snow, Eddie Arnold, and Marty Robbins among others.

In conclusion

Due to the wide coverage and treatment the cowboy culture received in fiction and in films, the cowboy has become the iconic image of the American west.

Priya Peiris

Read Plantation Songs

ROY ROGERS – ‘KING OF THE COWBOYS’

July 18, 2017 by admin

Cowboys, King of the Cowboys, Plantation Songs, Priya Peiris, Roy Rogers

Roy Rogers was the world’s most popular hero of every youngster from the 1930s to 1950s period. He was an American film idol, guitarist and singer – known as the ‘King of the Cowboys’.

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Nostalgia

During mid 1950s, my early school days, he was the craze of every kid and teenager. Those of you in my age group would remember him while playing ‘cowboys and crooks’ (quite similar to ‘hora police’, as referred to by some), as a matter of routine, school interval pranks!

Although the older generation would remember him, it is important for the nowadays youngsters to know about the good old days, and especially about the ‘King of the Cowboys’.

Career and Details

Roy Rogers (1911 – 1998) was born and raised in Portsmouth, Ohio, USA, and worked as a peach picker and truck driver as a youngster. His birth name was Leonard Slye. After giving up his jobs and encountering many ups and downs, he got into singing and made his mark with unbelievable success in many movies and TV serials, including the famous ‘Roy Rogers Show’.

His sidekick was his faithful palomino (horse) Trigger, always featured alongside him both on TV and movies. Trigger was reckoned as the most intelligent and smartest horse in the silver screen. Roy’s dog, a German shepherd named Bullet was also a great star, always at hand and alive to warn of any impending dangers.

‘Sons of the Pioneers’ was the name of Roy’s famous music band. They too were featured in many movies. Some of the cowboy films that featured Roy Rogers were, Hollywood Canteen, Sunset in Eldorado, San Fernando Valley, Underneath the Western Stars, Arizona Kid, The Golden Stallion, Cowboy and the Senorita.

His famous cowboy songs include Happy Trails, Don’t Fence Me In, Home on the Range, Roll Along Blue Shadows; I’m back in the Saddle Again, Red River Valley, and I’ve Sold My Saddle for an Old Guitar.

His Popularity

Roy Rogers was married thrice and with his third wife Dale Evans they endured a successful movie and singing career which lasted their lifetime. Roy’s theme song, Happy Trails was composed by Dale and sung by them as a beautiful duet. Roy Rogers’ popularity was such that his pin-up pictures were available everywhere. His comics (cartoon character books) were the craze of all youngsters throughout the world. Many Roy Rogers pictures adorned sweets and bubble-gum wrappers and stickers, adventure novels, comic books, play-sets, and a variety of marketing successes.

He was second only to Walt Disney creations such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs etc. In the numbers of items featuring his name.

On an average he used to receive around eighty thousand fan mail every month (would you believe that!). The incomparable Roy Rogers was inducted to the country music hall of fame twice – first as a member of his band, Sons Of The Pioneers in 1980, and yet again as an individual in 1988.

Although his movie roles depicted him with a gun, in reality he vehemently opposed gun culture publicly. He and his loving wife were both deep rooted Christians and they founded many children’s charities and adopted four children.

His Death and Legacy

Roy Rogers died in 1998 aged 87. His wife Dale Evans also passed away a few years later. They were buried side by side at Apple Valley, Sunset Hills Memorial Park, San Bernardino County, California, in a beautiful western location close by to their home.

The Roy Rogers – Dale Evans museum in Branson, Missouri houses interesting memorabilia, including handprints of Roy Rogers and hoof prints of Trigger, hats, belts, boots, guns, guitars, rings, badges, etc. It also houses the happy trails theater where Roy’s music is performed by his son Roy ‘Dusty’ Rogers Jr., twice a day, five days of the week.

Roy Rogers was an incomparable star – a legend and an icon like no other!

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Note: If interested, you are welcome to listen to his songs and watch his movies on YouTube and gather more information about him.

Priya Peiris

My Reflections and Experiences of the Sooriya Show

May 4, 2017 by admin

La Bambas, Priya Peiris, Sooriya Records, sooriya show

Having performed at all live SOORIYA SHOWS during the mid-60s and 70s era as a member of the La Bambas, I carry fond and vivid memories including personal experiences about them, although I must confess some interesting happenings and anecdotes could be forgotten by me due to the passage of time.

The star spangled SOORIYA SHOW – that’s how these stage shows were introduced by the debonair compere Mr. Vijaya Corea (latterly, Dr. Vijaya). I believe that around two SOORIYA Shows were organized annually, featuring the galaxy of singing stars that included Darlene Arnolda, Noeliine Mendis, Sam Nathan, Desmond de Silva, M.S. Fernando in addition to the 70s groups such as Moonstones, Three Sisters, Los Flamencos, La Bambas, Dharmaratne Brothers with Shiromie Fernando, Paul Fernando and Victor Silva who had all recorded on the SOORIYA record label during those halcyon and tranquil days.

Most of the shows were held in Colombo at the Nawarangahala and the Ramakrishna Mission hall in Wellawatte – prime venues at that time. The shows were well planned – never too long and boring like certain nowadays programs and were around 3 hour’s duration at the most. The program would start on time and finish likewise. Most importantly, the music which was all performed on stage (not ‘programmed’ the easy way out like nowadays, with technology rather than talent) was very listenable and not unbearable and loud!

A Personal Experience

I recall that the La Bambas required six microphones on stage for our performance – unlike the individual artistes and certain others, as the six of us had to blend our vocal harmonies in a balanced manner while at the same time our unplugged acoustic guitar playing plus the percussion sounds also had to be carried via the sound system and heard by the audience to their liking. All of this ‘balancing act’ was a tricky and a frightening experience! Due to this technical difficulty, at our behest, we were slotted to perform at these shows soon after the halfway intermission. This gave us the opportunity to organize ourselves on stage while the curtain was closed and none in the audience would observe the halabaloo going on behind the stage from where they are seated!

I remember the sound engineer – the amiable Tissa’s role during the interval to ensure that all microphones were placed and balanced accordingly. Once the curtain opened and we began to perform, we would very carefully but feverishly listen to what is heard over the speakers to the best of our ability and adjust our volume and positions with the microphones as quickly as possible during the act itself. This was a nightmare that many other singers did not experience, as an unbalanced result would have been disaster for us!

The SOORIYA SHOW also took us to Kandy a couple of times. I also remember the C.T. SOORIYA SHOW executed as a joint effort along with Mr. C.T. Fernando at the Sugathadasa indoor stadium, when compere Vijaya Corea had to rush out somewhere no sooner the show began – and believe me, I had to compere the entire show wearing someone else’s coat! (Therefore I believe I am the only person other than Dr. Vijaya Corea to compere a SOORIYA SHOW perhaps by default!).

Each SOORIYA SHOW drew a capacity crowd. They were all family oriented programs. Although there were friends and buddies who planned and came for the show, it was more of an intimate affair where family members thronged to witness these shows in great numbers…

« Next

I encountered Victor Ratnayake in Nugegoda

T. M. Jayaratne: The man behind the voice

Amaradeva: the Voice of the Nation for the Nation

Amaradeva: a name for everything that is our little island

For Clarence Wijewardena: Soaking it all in

Cowboys and Cowboy Songs

ROY ROGERS – ‘KING OF THE COWBOYS’

My Reflections and Experiences of the Sooriya Show

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