RIP Kersi Lord

Kersi Lord, one of Hindi film music’s most prolific geniuses, passed away on Sunday morning, a week after being diagnosed with septicemia. The 81-year-old was employed as an accordionist, drummer and glockenspiel player in Bollywood’s orchestra system, where large ensembles consisting of players spanning 40 to 80 musicians recorded songs and scores overseen by an arranger and a music director. But beyond that, he was also part of a select tribe of influential musicians who exposed the industry to the limitless possibilities of electronic music through synthesis.

Lord was quite literally a studio child. He accompanied his father, Cawas Lord – an illustrious musician himself who introduced Latin percussion to the Hindi film music industry – to studios littered across Mumbai. At 13, he began to play in them himself, while also studying piano at the insistence of his father; jazz harmony from musicians like Hal Green, who established the Bombay Swing Club in the late ’40s; and Indian classical from the Delhi gharana tabla player Inam Ali Khan. Besides practical apprenticeships and training, he was equally well-schooled in theoretical aspects of western classical music, orchestration and conducting.

By the mid-’60s, he had played music for several renowned music directors like C Ramachandra, OP Nayyar, Naushad and Madan Mohan, but it was director Usha Khanna – one of the few women in the male-dominated Bollywood industry – that fueled his already burgeoning appetite for music technology. She gave him his first professional break on the electric organ in 1963, which was already making waves in Bollywood studios for its unique sound.

Prior to his passing, Lord recalled, “One day, fooling, Usha said, ‘Why don’t you play the electric organ, if you’re so much interested in electronics?’... I took everything from my godown for the sitting. My guitar effects, my wow pedal, everything. I put all the gimmicks on the left. The organ had to be wired to the amplifier. It was not very impressive because pianos are touch-controlled and organs were not in those days.” Everyone else in the studio, however, was bowled over. “After that, everywhere, Kersi Lord,” he said. The word spread like wildfire and, overnight, it became his instrument of choice.

It was perfect timing. In his book, Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios, author Gregory Booth writes that between the mid-’60s and ‘70s, “the sheer size of the film orchestras and their instrumental sophistication increased.” Lord worked with the elite of Hindi film music directors, but it was his partnership with the maverick Rahul Dev “RD” Burman (fondly known as Pancham) from Chote Nawab (1961) till Parinda (1989), as well as his team of ace musicians, that changed the sonic landscape of the Hindi film industry.

As a teenager, Burman regularly raided Lord’s music collection, soaking in varied music influences. “I knew Pancham since he was 14,” said Lord. “When he was schooling, he’d come home for the vacations. I was playing for his dad, SD Burman. From the first time we met, we gelled. Whenever I was free, he’d come over to the house, look around my house and listen to everything: Latin, jazz, classical.”

There were plenty of experiments with electronic music along the way. Lord and Burman were unique sparring partners. Pancham would call Lord in the middle of the night, invite himself over and bounce off ideas. “‘Are you asleep?’ He’d ask, calling at 1:30 AM, and then come over with scotch, two glasses, to say, ‘I want something that sounds like…whoop-whoop-whoop.’”

Lord turned to fellow electronic music enthusiast Datta Davjekar for help. “I phoned him and said, ‘DD, I have a tough assignment.’” Lord remembered how oscillators function for tuning AM radio. He also dug out an old magazine that had instructions on building a pitch control oscillator. He asked Davjekar for four oscillators and four octave switches. In a few days, Lord had a rudimentary, custom-made synth that was able to generate a siren-like sound that Burman was looking for in the 1972 song “SaRe Ke SaRe GaMa Ko Lekar.”

In movies like Aradhana and Kati Patang, Lord used his Roland echo machine to great effect in the songs and the background music. Despite the protests, and annoyance of the director Shakti Samanta, who was distrustful of the technology, both albums were monster hits. At other times, Burman drew flak for his own penchant for experimentation, like with “Dhannon ki aankhon mein,” where a guitar was hooked up to a flanger he had picked up as an impulse buy on a visit to America.

Lord was inspired by artists like Wendy Carlos, whose 1968 release “Switched-On Bach,” with the then relatively unknown Moog synthesizer, got him hooked on electronic music. But he was also captivated by those closer to home. Ananda Shankar, who in 1970 put out a groundbreaking self-titled debut album, married the sounds of the sitar with keyboardist Paul Beaver‘s Moog. In 1973, Lord acquired one for himself, smuggled in from America.

Indeed, Lord was the owner of the first Minimoog in India, and was deploying it throughout the ’70s to soundtrack Burman’s whims. In “Dulhan Maike Chali,” his Moog stitches together the star-studded vocalists’ verses. For the delightfully swingy “Hum Tumse Mile,” the synth and the flanger move the melody along efficiently. And it takes center stage on the playful romantic number “Ye Ladka Hay Allah Kaisa Hai Diwana.”

By the mid-’80s, Lord had built up an arsenal of synths. They included Roland’s Jupiter series (4, 8 and 6), the Yamaha DX7 and the Ensoniq ESQ-1, among a host of other analogue machines and effects. “From monophonic to polyphonic to MIDI, we had to keep changing our synths,” said Lord. “My regular setup was stacks of keyboards, two or three modules and two or three echo machines. And the pedals, which you can’t see in pictures.”

As the ’80s came to a close, Lord’s continued success meant that for the first time in Bollywood’s orchestra system, musicians became redundant. As author Gregory Booth writes, “The lush scores, enormous orchestras and recording methods of late Old Bollywood were often very expensive... The tension between enthusiasm for new possibilities and a desire to retain live acoustic music practice was a feature of the late 1980s and ‘90s, especially for musicians who could see both sides of the situation... Kersi Lord was in the ambiguous position of leading the industry’s fascination with the possibilities of new technology while trying to maintain a rearguard action to protect acoustic performance. The results in a profit-driven industry like the film-music business in Mumbai were inevitable.”

By the mid-’90s, the only survivors were those who mastered electronic equipment. Musicians became keyboardists, the industry swarmed with gear and the trend would repeat itself when the era of music produced on computers took over the studio world. Those who believed they had survived by mastering technology were rendered obsolete once again. Lord naturally rode this wave, too.

Lord retired in 2000, unable to contain his frustration at his perceived ineptitude of music directors. “I quit because they would ask us to program, then change it, and do wrong stuff with it. So I thought it’s better to give up playing now,” he said. But he was always apologetic about how things panned out for other musicians. In an oft-quoted line, which Lord repeated here as well, he said, “Our programming ideas were never to replace the sound but to augment.”

Lord’s music isn’t easy to find in one easily digestible package. When asked if he’d ever thought to release original music, like Charanjit Singh, he claimed that he was never an album fan. “You made money in films, albums [are] where you lose money,” he adds. “I never thought I’d get any recognition. It was my bread and butter. I’m lucky that after 40 years people are talking about me.” As one of the pioneers of electronic music in India, he will not soon be forgotten.