Music is integral to most Bollywood movies, those colorful, often modestly budgeted pictures from India’s prolific film industry. Characters unselfconsciously break into song and even the gods themselves descend to join the dance. Among the most prolific composers for Bollywood, the team calling itself Laxmikant Pyarelal has issued at two-disc CD, Bollywood Remembers: Best of the EMI Years (released by Times Square Records), collecting recordings from 1963-1991.
L-P sometimes wrote and produced scores for dozens of movies each year, and while this album only scratches the surface of their discography, it makes available material that would otherwise be hard to find. Their music is neither the classical raga of Ravi Shankar nor an effort to ape the music of foreigners. Much of Bollywood Remembers is an intriguing and unstable hybrid of East and West, with trebly electric guitars and electric organ set against urgent Arabesque strings, or Western-sounding pop to a tabla beat, or turbulent tunes whose passionate vocals and otherworldly harmonies break all barriers.
