CM style interludes in "Greek Song" by Rufus Wainwright

[vasanthakokilam]

I heard this song at a restaurant tonight, Shazam identified the song for me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gr0cnKaCfs

You will know why I am posting this here if you listen at least past 1:10 and more

Is that Mohanam?

[varsha]

Is that Mohanam?

IlayaNarsimhaLsubbuMohana

[mahavishnu]

At least the PGRSRS phrase which comes around 1:10 is in Mohanam.
The violin on that track by Rufus Wainwright was played by the very talented Dr. Anjana Srinivasan of Montreal, a disciple of Lalgudi Vijayalakshmi and Vittal Ramamurthy.

[uday_shankar]

Actually, overall it is closer to Mohana Kalyani than Mohanam. There's ALWAYS a distinct N3 inflection such as S N D but not always the M2 inflections... However, the phrase starting at 1:32 runs something like G,,DPDP (M) GRS,,(N)D and is very Mohana-Kalyani-ish.

[vasanthakokilam]

Ah.. thanks. I do hear Mohana Kalyani very much now that Uday pointed that out at 1:32.

Mahavishnu, I was going to ask about who played that, thanks for the info. Any further back story on how this came to be? There is a general Beatles influence in that song. I was looking for some liner notes but could not find any. For whatever it is worth, I sent a tweet to @rufuswainwright but then he has 60K followers, so not holding out much hope for a reply.

Now it is coming to me. Anjana Srinivasan accompanied Maharapuram Srinivasan for his concert in Toronto in 2011, right?

[mahavishnu]

In fact, the album "Poses" has a cover track of the Beatles song "Across the Universe" with the whole Jai Guru Deva bit. My guess is that Rufus was looking for Indian sessions players at the time and this led him to Anjana Srinivasan.

The album came out in 2001; I was living in Montreal at the time and I remember Anjana talking about this then.
More about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poses_(album)

[arasi]

Yes, mOhanam in the upper 'gA ri sA' 'pA da sA's--and in the violin playing. I hear a gentle kind of mOhan kalyAni too.

'Mull of Kintyre' of Paul McCartney has much more mOhanam. Certainly, almost all of country music which I've happened to listen to is mOhanam based.

[vasanthakokilam]

Youtube has numerous live versions of this song by Rufus Wainwright. I was curious how those CMish portions sound without Anjana touring with him .

It is a riot. Some versions sort of skip over it, some interpret it differently for whatever reason, some try to play like the beautiful studio version by Anjana. Close but they do not quite get it, the slides make it sound like country music, as Arasi observed as well. I have not listened to too many, so may be someone managed to reproduce the cm vibe of the studio version.