Jazzing up Bollywood

On the 26th of January, 2022, Gyaan Adb hosted Jazzing Up Bollywood as a part of our initiative called GyaanPedia.

Our presenter for the evening was Mr. K.V Ramesh. He is a Marketing Professional with more than thirty years of experience in the medical equipment industry. He is also the head of the Training Academy in his company and conducts in-house and external trainings in his area of expertise, ICU ventilators.

His interests are music, movies, military history. He is a voracious reader of books on military history, which inspired him to write ‘Lights Camera War!’ which looks at 50 Indian war films from 1950 to 2020 across various Indian languages. He has also authored ‘Human Cinema’ and ‘City Life’

Mr. Ramesh began the evening by highlighting how his love for Jazz and Bollywood music led him down this path of exploration. Many classic Bollywood songs utilize Jazz elements, but succeed to maintain their unique identity despite borrowing from the Western genre. Apart from this, Mr. Ramesh also highlighted how all of us have had some introduction to Jazz by way of cartoon. This was demonstrated by using a small clipping of Tom & Jerry where the background score is Jazz.

The evening was a well balanced presentation between music and information. The audiences heard multiple songs such as Pick Yourself Up by Fred Astaire, That’s Amore by Dean Martin, Rum and Coca Cola by The Andrew Sisters and many more.

Next, Mr. Ramesh spoke in detail about how Bollywood composers like Madan Mohan and C.Ramachandra used Jazz in their compositions. If you missed out this event, please take a look at the video below.