R. D. Burman: what he actually changed

Pancham gets discussed either as a genius or as a plagiarist, and both conversations skip the thing that actually made his records sound different from everything around them.

He treated the studio as an instrument

Chura Liya opens on a fork struck against a wine glass. Elsewhere in his catalogue you find bottles blown across the top, sandpaper, comb and paper, a bamboo scraped. Nobody in Bombay was writing those into arrangements. He was a percussionist by instinct and he heard rhythm in objects.

He recorded voices close

Listen to Piya Tu Ab To Aaja and notice how much breath is left in. Asha Bhosle is audibly breathing between phrases, and it was left in deliberately. Playback convention of the time was a clean, projected, slightly distant vocal. Pancham brought the microphone in until the singer sounded like a person in the room.

He let his musicians be heard

The guitar figures people hum from these records are frequently Bhupinder Singh, a singer in his own right who played on the sessions. Pancham built arrangements around what specific players could do, which is why the records have fingerprints on them.

And yes, he borrowed

He did, openly, and so did everyone else. The Mehbooba trail runs to Cyprus. It is worth holding both facts at once: he took melodies, and he was still the most original record-maker in the industry, because the melody was never the part he was best at.