advaitam wrote:There was a post on another thread challenging if Murthy sir has played for any lady vocalists of yore apart from MSS
Three years later, here is the answer, from TKM himself, and it doesn't mince words
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One morning MS had come to his Guru’s house. “Do you know who this is?” my guru asked MS. “My son. He is excellent on the mridangam. This evening let’s have a kutcheri at home and he will play for you.” That evening a lasting bond between him and MS was established – for the next 55 years, TKM was her accompanist on the mridangam. “I am perhaps the only mridangam player who played for all the female musicians of that time. Pattamal, Vasanta Kumari, Sundarambal, Brinda and Mukta, everyone of them. They were remarkable. They had given so much thought to their music and achieved such complicated things in laya that it was challenging for the mridangam vidwan. In fact, I often feel that if mridangam vidwans refused to play for women it was because they were scared that they wouldn’t be able to measure up. It’s too much for their ego to have a woman as superior musician.”
See the whole article in the link in cienu's previous post.
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