Singers, composers gear up for first-ever film music awards

Singers, composers gear up for first-ever film music awards

24 Mar 2009, 0137 hrs IST, Bella Jaisinghani, TNN

MUMBAI: Curious half-lines of popular Bollywood songs emanated from Hotel J W Marriott on Monday afternoon. Every few minutes, a babel of voices
would rise and fall, debating whether a certain word in the song was vulgar or if a tune was good enough to qualify.

The cream of the crop of the film music industry was meeting to decide the nominations for the inaugural Tata Indicom Mirchi Music Awards (MMA) instituted by Radio Mirchi 98.3 FM. The awards ceremony will be held at a five-star hotel in Bandra on March 28.

The panel is a blend of the best writing and composing talent in the country, including Javed Akhtar, Suresh Wadkar, Sadhana Sargam, Shankar Mahadevan, Prasoon Joshi, Louis Banks, Kailash Kher, Kavita Krishnamurthy, Sonu Niigaam, Lalit Pandit, Kunal Kohli, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and veteran film-maker Ramesh Sippy.

Chairman of the jury, Javed Akhtar, said it was surprising how a country of over a billion people, most of whom associate the memories of their youth with some film song or other, did not have an exclusive awards ceremony to honour its music professionals."

Suresh Wadkar categorically said popularity was only one of the factors that would determine the winners of the 17 categories. "A composition doesn't become great just because it plays on FM radio over and over again,'' said the singer. "The lyrics, music and the rendition matter in equal degree.'' Prashant Panday, CEO of ENIL said, "The artistes have already adopted our brainchild and assured they will help it grow in years to come. We hope the Mirchi Music Awards become as big as the Filmfare Awards,'' Panday said.