THE LP RECORD THAT WILL PLAY FOREVER

Though LP was known as longplaying discs prior to the sixties, LP became a household name with the arrival of popular music composing duo Laxmikant-pyarelal into the Hindi film music scene in 1962. They composed music for about 500 Bollywood movies from 1963 to 1998, working for almost all notable filmmakers including Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, Feroze Khan, B.R. Chopra, Shakti Samanta, Manmohan Desai, Yash Chopra, Subhash Ghai and Manoj Kumar. Laxmikant Shantaram Kudalkar who was born in 1937, passed away in 1998. Pyarelal Ramprasad Sharma was born on September 3, 1940. Pyarelal celebrated his 78th birthday last week. pyarelal was the son of a renowned trumpeter Pt. Ramprasad Sharma (popularly known as Abbaji), who taught him the basics of music. He learnt to play violin from a Goanese called Anthony Gonsalves. Pyarelal started learning violin at the age of 8 and practised it 8 to 12 hours daily. At the age of 12, he started playing violin in studios to earn money for his family, whose financial condition had deteriorated. Laxmikant and Pyarelal met at Sureel Kala Kendra, a music academy for children, run by the Mangeshkar family. After she came to know about their financially poor backgrounds, Lata recommended their names to music directors like Naushad, Sachin Dev Burman and C. Ramchandra. Similar financial backgrounds and age made Laxmikant and Pyarelal very good friends. Laxmi-pyare hit the big time with Rajshri Productions’ 1964 film Dosti. After Dosti’s success, Laxmi-pyare started getting work from all major filmmakers. The rise of Laxmi-pyare, Rahul Dev Burman, and Kalyanji-anandji marked the end of an old era of Bollywood music, which belonged to Shankar-jaikishan, sachin Dev Burman, naushad, C. Ramchandra, Khayyam, Madan Mohan, O. P. Nayyar, Roshan and others. As musicians, Laxmikant Pyarelal have worked for every reputed music director of the 1950s with the exception of O.P. Nayyar. Even today, LP’S music is very popular all over India, even in the interior parts of the country.