It was midnight, music director AR Rahman recalls, over a decade ago when he knocked on the doors of a hotel room Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was staying in to learn Qawwali.
All through the night the Pakistani musician played on, as the young Rahman took notes in his small notepad. Rahman, now an Oscar-award winner, smiles as he recalls the incident during the course of a conversation with Director Bharat Bala as he narrates how he learnt the Qawwali style, which he infused in his own music later on.
This interest and the drive to constantly learn new things and introduce them in music is probably what sets the composer apart, says Bala, as he conversed with the maestro at an interaction organised by the Chennai International Centre.
Says Rahman: “I want to do something new every three years professionally.” This , he says, makes him push his music to higher levels , to make it an art.
That is probably the reason why he continues to stay relevant to his audience, the younger minds especially, 20 years ago and now. “And listening to your own music,” adds Rahman. “To be relevant you have to listen to your own music. Change the ideas; give it a soul,” he says. There are times when the music he composes takes months to come out of the studio, undergoing changes every time.
“If I do not like my music, it never goes out of my studio. You need to make music for yourself. You need to love what you compose.”
It is this attitude — to get to the depth of what he is working — that has made Rahman more than just a music composer. He dons many roles — music director, singer, conductor and, now, with his new movie, a film-maker as well. “When I was a kid, I was closed and depressed,” he reminisces. “So, when one door opened up, I just wanted to enter all of them, even film-making,” he explains.
Coming up with a concert movie, One Heart, that hit screens on Friday, was a gradual process. Coming from a musical family and getting so much from it, Rahman feels it is only natural that he wanted to give something back. But that could not have happened without the mentors and people he got to know during his musical journey, he acknowledges.
Working with great people like composers Ilayaraja, and MS Viswanathan and directors like Mani Rathnam showed Rahman a whole new world. “It made me realise that there is a much bigger world than movies,” he says.