When Pintu Bhattacharya was alive, the audience was often blessed with performances that presented his controlled vibrato tones and rhythmic variations that were, at once, yearning and melancholic. At a recent interactive session at the Calcutta Press Club one afternoon, his former student, Prabuddha Raha (picture), recreated some of Bhattacharya’s songs for YouTube. The performers’ panel also had other prominent personalities associated with the late singer, including Haimanti Shukla, Montu Bhattacharya (the late singer’s brother), Aloke Roy Choudhury and Srikanta Acharya.
Raha regaled the audience with anecdotes from his early sessions with Bhattacharya when the former was only 11 years old. The two songs shown to the audience through the audiovisual format were “Jani na kokhon je se” and “Tumi nirjon upokule nayikar moto”. In the former, Raha replaced the inherent emotional austerity of the song with a muscular lightness that was distinct enough to convey the bouncy arrangement of words, whereas the latter (composed by Sudhin Dasgupta) demonstrated Raha’s ability to amalgamate emotional and rhythmic elements, creating instantly comprehensible moments for listeners. Both were powerful displays of uncompromising music.
On the audience’s demand, Raha sang Bhattacharya’s evergreen song, “Ek Tajmahal goro” (composed by Nachiketa Ghosh), keeping the mood uplifting yet meditative. Raha also deliberated on the importance of the word, ‘ek’, in the original version. The live rendition had its moments of anguish with Raha maintaining the right texture in his vocals for the motley crowd. Sudip Das mostly retained the musical arrangements of the original songs while also ensuring that the modern insertions were unobtrusive.