I was browsing around Som Records in Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago when I first heard the music of Sunil Ganguly. The owner of the shop had just received Ganguly’s Electric Guitar Hindi Film Tunes from an outside source and was playing it for the first time. I listened to the first three or so songs before approaching the dude working at the shop with a couple questions. Unfortunately, this was the first time that the shop owner had ever seen or heard a Ganguly album, so I had to result to Google and a co-worker to find out more about the Indian musician.

While I was still in the shop, the first thing I noticed about Ganguly’s tunes was his use of a Hawaiian electric guitar and a little research led me to discover that’s exactly what the respected gayaki style guitarist was known for in India. The Hawaiian guitar was used in Indian films during the 40s and 50s as background music as a sign of sorrow. The guitars were very popular in India because of the style in which it is played and the fact that traditional Indian music is built around melodies. Ganguly, a skilled classical Indian musician, re-made a bunch of hit Bollywood songs spanning the decades between 1940 and 1980 using a Hawaiian guitar. His mastery of the traditional song structure was meshed with elements like sitar synthesized sounds, funk, strings, flutes, Afro-Cuban claves, and of course the steel guitar.

I was talking to my co-worker about Ganguly and sent her “Kitne Bhi Tu Karle Sitam” that I ripped from vinyl. She instantly remembered the song from her childhood in India and said it was from the popular Bollywood film “Sanam Teri Kasam.” You can check out the original song (with vocals by singer Kishore Kumar) and scene from the 1982 flick via YouTube and stream it on Music India Online. I’ve read that Ganguly didn’t always cite the films from which he covered songs, but on the record I have he did cite them.

Ganguly died in June of 1999 after a recording career that spanned more than 40 years that began in 1957 when his first album dropped on HMV. Check out the festive “Kitne Bhi Tu Karle Sitam” below and for more from Ganguly and Hindi film instrumentals, head over to Bollywood Vinyl and Hamara CD. [Note: sorry for the lack of bass on the recording, I'm just getting the hang of converting vinyl to MP3 format]

[MP3]: Sunil Ganguly  ”Kitne Bhi Tu Karle Sitam”
Electric Guitar Hindi Film Tunes, EMI; 1982