AR Rahman and Freida Pinto were the guests of Jay Leno on what he officially designated as Slumdog Night on his show. Freida looked stunning in an off-the-shoulder tinted cream pastel dress and AR performed ‘Jai Ho’ with a complement of Bollywood dancers to rapturous applause. Both ‘Jai Ho’ and ‘O Saya’ are nominated for Best Song at the Oscars and if one of them doesn’t win, it will be a travesty! It’s hoped that AR’s collaborator on Slumdog, the fascinating and astonishingly vibrant MIA, will also attend – although she has only recently given birth.
AR, who has scored for more than a hundred movies, as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams stage musical, tried to explain recently his process for composition, “I like to see a film and then start scoring it in my mind, while doing something unrelated,” he explained, “You just grasp a film and start working, and something unpredictable comes out from a third element. The mind, the more active it is, the more productive it is.”
Legendary jazz pianist Herbie Hancock is looking forward to performing with AR in Chennai later this month as part of a goodwill tour that includes Martin Luther King III and diva Chaka Khan. “I absolutely loved the music of Slumdog,” he said, “It combines the influence of several cultures.”
