The city was Cape Town. Jagjit Singh’s concert in South Africa had been much looked forward to that year. However, things went haywire due to a baggage mix-up. Singh’s book, where he had jotted down his numerous ghazals, was in one of the bags that got misplaced. But the concert had to get going, and Singh had to get on stage. He did so, and right away told the audience he didn’t have his book of songs with him. As a result, he warned them, he may forget lines every now and then. He wanted the audience to prompt the next line, every time he got stuck. Through the concert, every time Singh got stuck on a particular verse, someone in the audience would stand up and holler out the lines to him. Every ghazal he sang was already known by the audience, which came as a surprise even to the maestro.
Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma doesn’t hide the pride he feels for his now deceased friend while narrating this incident. He’s overcome by emotion too, but he keeps that aside for a while as he reminisces about the time he spent with his old companion. “My memories with Jagjit Singh extend over four decades; it’s akin to a lifetime. That quality of voice; he had to have been blessed. Like they say “unke gale main ishwar basta thha,” says Panditji. About the person, he says, “He was easily the best ghazal singer in the country, yet there was no arrogance. And Jagjit had a great sense of humour. He wasn’t the kinds who spoke much, but he had the ability to utter a few words in a conversation that had everyone in splits.”
The santoor player says that Singh ushered in a new era of ghazal singing in the country, a style that benefited numerous films too. “He came on to the scene at a juncture when the film industry had lost its sense of melody, and poetry was completely missing. At a time like that, Jagjit’s songs in arthouse films, like ‘woh kaagaz ki kashti’ and ‘tumko dekha toh yeh khayal aaya’, brought melody back to films.” Simplicity of words, meaningful poetry and smart orchestration set Jagjit Singh apart from earlier ghazal singers, Sharma says. “We could compare his songs to the kind of ghazals sung by Begum Akhtar Sahiba, which were very different. But Begum herself was a fan of Jagjit.”
Among Jagjit Singh’s many film songs, one that struck a chord with the current generation – even introduced younger minds to his music, may be –was ‘Hoshwaalon ko khabar kya’ from Sarfarosh. The film had Naseeruddin Shah in the role of a ghazal singer from across the border, and director John Mathew Matthan says he only had Jagjit Singh in mind for it. “I chased him for a year. We had already prepared a scratch version of Nida Fazli’s lyrics, which I had used to shoot some montage scenes, featuring actors Aamir Khan and Sonali Bendre. I showed them to Jagjit Singh; he agreed to come on board immediately after.”
Getting him to sing the ghazal was a moment of jubilation for the entire team, Matthan recalls. “For me, it was the chance to work with a man I had revered all my life; I have been an avid listener of not just his ghazals, but bhajans too.” Matthan says a few years after his first film, he went to Jagjit Singh to sing another song for his next, Shikhar. “He told me he trusted me as a director after what I had done with Sarfarosh, and that he would sing the song for free. The gesture was touching.”
Musician Raghu Dixit says that every man has at least one phase in life when he’s hooked to Jagjit Singh’s music. “I had such a phase too. It was in my late teens and a friend from Delhi had gifted me a cassette of his ghazals. There was a comforting quality about his voice that soothed broken hearts,” says the musician, adding that ‘Tum itna jo muskura rahein ho’ will always remain the song he’ll most remember Singh by.
Sharma, who says that he hasn’t heard anyone with the voice quality of Jagjit Singh in all his time as a musician, sums up the ghazal king’s genius in seven simple words, “There will never be another Jagjit Singh.”
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