Plucky man

N S Prasad, Bangalore's most famous mandolin artiste, is gravitating towards fusion shows and solo albums

Plucky man

N S Prasad, Bangalore's most famous mandolin artiste, is gravitating towards fusion shows and solo albums

N S Prasad is featured on hundreds of film and sugama sangeeta albums as a sessions artiste, but only in the past year has he started recording independent albums.

Prasad (49) hails from Mysore, where he started playing the mandolin in college. At 11, he had started learning the veena from V Desikachar (the legendary Veena Doreswamy Iyengar's brother). But he was drawn to the mandolin when he heard a player who was to later become his teacher, Ratan.

In the 1980s, when the Kannada recording industry boomed in Bangalore, he settled in this city and became a busy sessions artiste, playing for some of India's best-known film and non-film music composers.

He particularly remembers his time with Vijay Raghava Rao, the highly regarded Films Division music director. "He had a 16-day project in Bangalore," recalls Prasad. "But he didn't give me any work for the first four days".

A dejected Prasad was about to give up and go home when the flautist-composer heard him during a break. "He gave me plenty to do through the rest of the project," says Prasad.

When sugama sangeeta became all the rage in the 1980s, Prasad was a regular with its star performers, first Mysore Ananthaswamy, and then C Ashwath, Shimoga Subbanna, and Narasimha Nayak. With his brother N S Muralidhar, he played on the stage with almost everyone who was anyone in Kannada music. He composed tunes for Geeta Ratna, a bhavageete album featuring Ratnamala Prakash, one of the biggest draws of Kannada sugama sangeeta.

The hearty Prasad has a reputation for being short-tempered, but that, he says, is because he can't stand the idea that producers treat musicians without respect. "I throw tantrums so that they talk to us on equal terms," he says, matter-of-factly.

As an arranger for C Aswath, Prasad worked on some big film projects, including the commercially successful Chinnari Mutta and Kotreshi Kanasu. He also fondly remembers working with the late L Vaidyanathan, whom he considers a thinking composer.

As a regular on the sugama sangeeta circuit, Prasad does get tired, repetitive, and bogged down, but his imagination is fired when faced with real musical challenges. Not many know that he can play the banjo (in Bangalore music circles, his name has become synonymous with the mandolin); he has recorded some inspired passages on that infrequently used instrument.

He has many stories to tell from his studio days. A composer divided the violin section into smaller groups and gave notations. When they played together, it was ugly and cacophonic... And then he synced the take with the film. It was an appalling shot of a polluted river. The stink hit us when the music came on... such was his creativity.

A serious road accident robbed him of the strength in his hand for some years, but he has overcome that setback, and is now busy planning solo shows and albums.

Among his better-known fusion albums are Beginning of Beginning with Vishwamohan Bhat, Earth, Wind and Fire, with flautist Ronu Majumdar and saxophonist Kadri Gopalnath, and Strings, featuring the violin maestro M S Gopalakrishnan. Unni Menon and Kavitha Krishnamurthy have sung his compositions, but one regret is that a dream project with Lata Mangeshkar fell through at the last moment.

Prasad travels all over the globe for his shows, and has just returned from a fusion concert at Dubai. He teaches at Ragashree Institute of Music, which he has set up near Banashankari. The latest award to come his way is from the Sangeet Academy.

Sur Madhur was Prasad's first solo album. In the recent past, he has been more prolific with his solo recordings.

In Raagamaalika, released earlier this year, he plays five ragas, and in Serene Melodies, he renders popular Dasa compositions. But the album that's selling wildly is Ellelli Nodali, in which he plays Rajkumar hits.