MUMBAI: A decade ago, Indian music industry had a handful but the finest set of musicians who ruled the music industry. Most of them are no longer with us but their music still remains and it reminds of the fineness their art brought. Suresh Wadkar is one such musical gem that is amongst us. In spite of being classically trained Wadkar entered the Bollywood industry with his first song in 1978. Since then he has only made the industry proud.
In a heart-to-heart conversation with Radioandmusic.com at Amaravati Global Dance and Music Festival, Wadkar spoke about the new generation of the music industry and its changes.
He has observed every new generation after him and says they are more talented than the previous generation of singers and music composers. “Today’s generation is much more talented than us and the type of exposure they receive is amazing. We see them becoming overnight stars. If we had this kind of exposure during our time, we too would have reached another level.”
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While Wadkar is extremely impressed with the quality of singers, he is a bit upset with new music composers and their working style. “The depth and polishing a song should get is missing in today’s composition. The working system of music composition is vague. Nowadays seven singers sing the same song, but nobody knows which singer’s voice will be finalised until the end,” share the singer.
He further adds, “A singer should always feel secure and confident, but the industry today lacks to give that support to the singer. So, the newcomers feel ‘let’s do something great in the limited time frame’. Also, to sing a song is very important to learn well. Lots of practice is required for a perfect output. The generation is working by observing the other talents instead of learning on its own, which is important.”
The Bollywood industry is gradually adopting western music. Thus, the essence of Indian and classical music is somewhere lost. On this Wadkar says, “Western music was adopted by composers earlier too but that music was recognised. Today every single song is same as the other. It is good to adopt other genres of music but there is no variety.”
The demand for film songs is changing today and so is the lyric writing. Talking about it the singer avers, “As far as words are concerned, they are more gimmickry, also there are no situational songs in the films. The directors ask the music composers to create item songs as they are more popular. Melodious songs are now only in the background. Earlier there were songs in sync with dialogues. The mood of a song was created in the background before the song played. These musical aspects do not exist anymore.”
Suresh Wadkar currently runs a musical school named ‘Aajiwan’. Other than that his focus is more on bhajans, private albums, and Marathi films music. Last year he released his album ‘Chupke Chupke’ and his next release will be a ‘pop-album’.
