Highly Entertaining Music. Review on Jaaneman Songs

I don’t remember any Anu Malik’s soundtrack since ‘Asoka’ which I liked as much as I like ‘Jaan-e-Mann’. As Anu is notorious for his plagiarized songs, we all suspect the originality when something really good comes out of his keys. If the music for this movie is genuine then for sure he has lot of untapped potential in him. There is a typical Rahman sound in all the songs, actually not in the tune but in the orchestration and arrangements. I think Anu Malik is least responsible for this as we have G.V. Prakash (A.R.Rahman’s nephew) on credits for Music programming and arrangements. G.V. Prakash should be equally lauded for the way Anu Malik’s bollywoodish tunes are arranged with richness and grandeur like songs made for a western stage musical.

I don’t know whether it is because of the colorful CD cover, when I listen to each song, I sense colors in it like roughly how the visuals of these songs would look on screen. The music in each of the song takes dramatic twists and turns to various crests and troughs of tempos, moods in it. The album as a whole is bouquet of variety of genre of music with neatly layered colorful flowers in it and a central theme or tune of the song binds all these colorful flowers together giving out a pleasant fragrance in the air.

Piano, flute, Guitar the usual romantic instruments playing the soulful tunes in the preludes and interludes, layers of e-beats with Tabla and rocking acoustic drums and percussions to add a foot tapping rhythm to the melodies, soothing strings used adequately to enhance the underlining emotions in the songs, expressive vocals of singers like Sonu Nigam, Adnan Sami, Udit, Sadhana Sargam, Sukhwinder Singh, much wanted Indian touch in the main tune of the song, east meets west kind of fusion rich interludes, grand western choirs aptly put at right places in the mood curve of the songs, simple lyrics of Gulzar - all these put together makes up a delicious Masala puri and are highly entertaining. Each song has got a slow and subdued starting, a middle portion partly hanging on the main tune and partly filled with deviating (quite a lot) interludes and a grand dramatic ending with full throttled orchestration. Though this is the format of the most of Indian songs, the sweet surprises thrown in here and there in terms of format and arrangements keep us glued to the songs. The soundtrack has got three soulful melodies and three foot-tapping numbers. The songs sure would be chartbusters. Please skip the remix versions of the songs, as always there is nothing special about these versions.

This album could be termed as a truly Bollywood one in a sense that Indian film music itself is an amalgamation of all forms of music in the world layered with our own Indian classical and folk music. Rock n roll, Jazz, pop, fusion, European, middle eastern, African and you name it we have it in Indian film music and so is in this soundtrack. We have all necessary and usual clichés of the Bollywood music in this soundtrack but the good thing is that it is done in an interesting and acceptable way with even a brief music cue in the song being composed to be instantly catchy.

Though we claim to make musicals in Bollywood, how many of them are actually musicals? Just by having a song and dance sequence in a movie, we cannot call it as a real musical. But going by the kind of music scored for Jaan-e-Mann, this movie sounds to be a real musical and if it really is, then the music is perfectly in synch with the genre of the movie. No song sounds to be an item number or filler. It seems they were composed for a particular situation and yet are made to sound catchy. Let us see, how well these songs unfold visually on screen.