Ilaiyaraaja
Early Life
Ilaiyaraaja is an Indian music composer and singer who works in the Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam and Kannada film industries. He was born as Gnanathesikan in Tamil Nadu. His brother Gangai Amaran is also a music composer and lyricist. He is regarded as one of the finest music composers in India. Popular world cinema portal Taste of Cinema placed Ilaiyaraja at the 9th position in its list of 25 greatest film composers in the history of cinema. He has composed for over 1000 films and composed 8000 songs. He has won five Indian National Film Awards. He has also been awarded the Padma Bhushan.
Career Highlights
Ilaiyaraaja made his debut with the film Annakkili (1976). By the mid-1980’s, he was gaining popularity as a film composer in the South Indian film industry. He composed music for Nayagan (1987), an Indian film ranked by TIME Magazine as one of the all-time 100 best movies. The Black Eyed Peas sampled the Ilaiyaraaja composition ”Unakkum Ennakum” from Sri Raghavendra (1985), for the song ”The Elephunk Theme” on Elephunk (2003). In 2003, according to an international poll conducted by BBC, people from 155 countries voted his composition Rakkamma Kaiya Thattu from the 1991 film Thalapathi as fourth in the world’s top 10 most popular songs of all time. He has composed the music for the films Amma Kanakku, which is scheduled for June and Appa, which is releasing in July, 2017. He also has the films Muthuramalingam, Sabash Naidu and Sabash Kundu in 2016.