Mani Ratnam got into filmmaking after completing MBA. Ramana Gogula quit a lucrative job with Seagate to score music in films and dabble in Indi-pop (remember Aye Laila in 1997?).

Playback singer R. Jayadev too turned his back on an MBA degree and the white-collar job it fetched him. The chart-topping musician, with hits in several languages, recalls how he badly wanted to be a singer even as he did his MBA to keep his parents in good humour.

“…my family wished that I become professionally qualified and I did not see much harm in that… (but) I wanted my music to feed me,” he says. While studying for MBA, he undertook a psychometric test that showed he was not a 9-to-5 person. “Not that it was a big surprise to me,” he says.

This only served to firm his resolve. “I worked in a firm for just six months before taking the plunge.”

That brave move certainly seems to have paid off, with the songs he sang for Maaveeran , the Tamil remake of the Telugu-hit Magadheera , earning him all-round praise. Even before that, he made a name for himself with the song “ Nenjankootil ” in Dishyum (Tamil), which ruled the charts for quite some time. He had another hit in “ Yen enakku ” in Naan Avvan Illai . Incidentally, the music for both these hits was scored by Vijay Antony of “ Naka muka ” fame.

Recognition also came when Oscar-winner A.R. Rahman roped him to sing a part of “ Ek Lo Ek Muft ” in Guru along with Bappi Lahiri.

Growing up in Chennai, although singing had been his passion since childhood, Jayadev started learning music only at the age of 20. “Once I started learning music I did it with a vengeance, and within four years I almost turned professional, winning quite a few competitions,” he says.

In Chennai, he formally trained under Krishnanand. While doing his MBA in Delhi, he enrolled at the Sangeeth Gandharv Mahavidyalay. Later, in Aurangabad, he learnt Hindustani music from Ustad Nath Neralkar. Currently his guru is Veereshwar Maadri.

In his six-year stint in the music world, Jayadev has sung in 11 languages including Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Baduga (spoken in Ooty or Udhagamandalam), and Punjabi. Among music directors, besides Antony and Rahman, he has worked with Srikant Deva, Mani Sharma and Devi Prasad.

His biggest break, and the feather in his cap, remains his performance under M.M. Kreem's baton for Maveeran . Initially he was meant to sing only one song, but the impressed music director ultimately got him to sing five songs for the film, which ran 50 days in Tamil Nadu.

Widening his range, he has recorded a Sufi song for the the Hindi film Kshan Kshan (music by R P. Pattnaik).

“His repertoire is amazing, he can sing at a good bass in the lower octave to a higher octave with a refreshing sweet voice. His future looks bright and big music directors could lap him up,” says T.N. Ashok, a family friend and communication specialist, who has watched Jayadev from his early years.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW