Aye Laila-Misty Rhythms...an unusual music album

Album cover-Aye Laila - Misty Rhythms

Ramana Gogula

Kush Khanna

I accidentally found my once-upon-a-time favourite music album online…some blessed soul had uploaded it…and I discovered that it is still one of my favourites…

Music has this strange quality about it that flashbacks you exactly to the same time and place and Aye Laila did that exactly to me…I was transported back in time to my days in the hostel where musical explorations was a thrill and an adventure by themselves… Aye Laila landed in my collection as part of one such musical expedition…I was, maybe, a year or so into ‘fusion’ music and anything out of the ordinary was acceptable musical fodder…some were not ‘fusion-istic’ enough…some were ‘good’…some were ‘imitations’… some did not have what I felt was essential for ‘fusion’…an inexplicable thing called ‘namak’… Aye Laila had two totally unknown names…Ramana Gogula (then) and Kush Khanna…both were based in the US and had formed a musical collaboration and named their band as Misty Rhythms… Ramana Gogula would eventually go on to become a household name in Andhra Pradesh due to his ‘different’ compositions for Telugu films…but Misty Rhythms was probably a kind of portfolio of Ramana Gogula…Kush Khanna is a trained tabla player…and whereas Ramana Gogula, growing up in India, was fascinated by reggae, rock, and obviously admired Bob Marley, Kush Khanna, in the US, grew up learning the tabla and Indian rhythms…and they met in San Francisco and musical interactions resulted in their forming a band called Misty Rhythms… ‘misty’ being a tribute to the misty mornings in San Francisco…and ‘rhythms,’ obviously to the Indian, African, and Reggae rhythms…

This album was released by Sony India and at that time I did not have enough money to buy a CD, and therefore bought a cassette…when I hear those songs now, I look back and try to ‘see’ how I felt when I heard then for the first few times…this album had a total of 12 tracks… and for somebody like me who was exploring different musics, it was a musical treat…the opening bars of the first song ‘Aye Laila’ got me hooked…the song starts of as strumming of an ektara kind of sound and slowly the rhythm sneaks in and before you know what is happening the tune segues into a full blown reggae rhythm…and from somewhere else comes the harmonica…breathes in a tune for a few seconds…and the song begins with Ramana Gogula’s vocals… just lovely…! I thought that the first song is a sample Reggae song and that there would be many more ‘kinds’ of music that this album stores…I was wrong…the album is soaked with Reggae rhythms…at least 5 songs are infused with Reggae and this was for me the first non-Bob Marley album that had so much hypnotic Reggae rhythm…and that too an Indian music album…! There are other kinds of music also…for once you some kind of a European folk song (which I learnt later, was a Bulgarian folk song), and one also gets to hear 3 straightforward instrumental renditions…with lots of Indian classical sounds… and this album also brings in Telugu lyrics …the first song ‘Aye Laila’ is reprised as ‘Aye Pilla’ with Telugu lines replacing the Hindi ones…

And this album so fascinated me that I’d have presented copies to at least 6-7 friends on their birthdays…and they were more than pleased to listen to such refreshing ‘Indian’ music…but the saddest part was this remained their one and only album so far and I don’t see any hope of a second…and therefore, it is also one of a kind musical treat… search online and you find the album somewhere…and you will not regret listening to Misty Rhythms…