A.V.RAMANAN'S MUSIANO

A.V.Ramanan's Musiano was extremely popular in the 70's and 80's. My entire family was a big fan of A.V.Ramanan in those days. I have been to many of his programmes with my father, mother and sister. The song selection, singing and orchestration used to be extremely good. It is not easy to render the film songs on the stage without mistakes and I must say that the Musiano troupe used to do a very good job of it.

Ramanan and Uma were singing together on stage and later got married. Uma Ramanan is more popular than A.V.Ramanan as she has sung several hit songs in Tamil Films. Ilayaraja has given her some extraordinary compositions and she has excelled in all the songs.

In those days the 3 hour programme of A.V.Ramanan's Musiano used to be filled with Hindi and Tamil Songs. A.V.Ramanan used to sing both Hindi and Tamil Songs with ease. They had a singer (I forgot his name) who used to sing like T.M.Soundararajan. Ramanan used to sing popular songs sung by Kishore Kumar, Mohamed Rafi, P.B.Sreenivas and S.P.Balasubramaniam. There used to be "Once More" shouts from the audience for every song that A.V.Ramanan sings. "Dekana hai re sochana" (धेकाना है रे सोचना ) used to be most popular song by A.V.Ramanan. He used to do the "yodeling" exactly the same way like the great Kishore Kumar.

There were a few troupes in those days like Kamesh Rajamani; Sivaraj Anand; Abaswaram Ramji. All of them played light music on stage and were rendering the popular R.D.Burman, M.S.V songs. Among the bunch of light music troupes A.V.Ramanan's Musiano was the best in the 70's. It was a great treat to go for these light music shows as we did not have the CDs, MP3 and USBs in those days.

A.V.Ramanan also conducted the most popular music show on Sun TV "Saptha Swarangal". It was a very good show and I used to watch that show regularly.

Long live A.V.Ramanan and his Musiano.

T.P.Anand
Dubai, U.A.E.
8th March 2012