A.R. Rahman is best known outside of India for his compositions on the soundtrack of Slumdog Millionaire, but he's written for many film scores.
The Best of A.R. Rahman has 14 tracks drawn from ten of them, though nothing from Slumdog Millionaire, which itself would seem to disqualify this as the best possible best-of. The minimal packaging doesn't tell us much about the composer or the recordings, though judging from the copyrights, the material spans 1997 to 2006. What it lacks in annotation, however, it does make up for in quantity, with 73 minutes of music. The music's as much of a mélange of different elements as devotees of Indian soundtracks have come to expect, to varying degrees fusing traditional-inclined Indian instrumentation and melodies with up-to-the-minute technobeats and energetic, at times sexy vocals. Even measured against the usual eclecticism of such productions,
Rahman is diverse, able to devise fairly frivolous dance numbers, straight-ahead romantic Indian pop, airy ballads, and pastoral pieces with a less urban flavor. Not much is easily pigeonholed, however; just when you think
Shreya Ghoshal and
Uday Mazumdar's "Barso Re" is going to be a pretty traditional tune without a whiff of modernity, the chanting choruses and hard electronic beats take it in a different direction. Not much of this is as eccentric to non-Indian ears as the kind of Bollywood that draws a cult following for its exotic feel, and some pieces, like
Lata Mangeshkar's "So Gaye Hain," have a sedate quality with more of the classical-influenced cinematic orchestration many associate with soundtracks the world over. But neither is it too mainstream, though Preeya Kalidas and Raza Jaffrey's "Shakalaka Baby," much of which is sung in English, comes close to being dancefloor filler that could be played almost anywhere in the world without sounding out of the ordinary. ~ Richie Unterberger