Vijaya Anand

The car stopped and two casually clad gentlemen stepped out through each door. Vijaya Anand fit the picture of a young, successful South Indian music director perfectly. He was wearing faded blue jeans, a tastefully printed polyester shirt with the two top buttons undone. I could see the long gold chain with a capital “V” for a pendant. Anand has everything a young cinema music director could want — charm, imagination and involvement in his field to the core. He has been enchanting audiences since ’82.

It’s been more than thirty years since that fateful Fulbright funded trip to India when painter Amy Sillman and her musician boyfriend Kurt Hoffman came across a bootleg cassette with the words Vijaya Anand - Dance Raja Dance scrawled across its cover. When they played it for us, we had no idea that this would result in a decades-long project—including multiple trips to meet Vijaya and a collaboration with David Byrne.

Here's what David Byrne had to say about Vijaya's glorious and groundbreaking filmi music (he was among the first wave to use electronic instruments in Indian film scores), which we compiled into a retrospective called Asia Classics 1: The South Indian Film Music of Vijaya Anand - Dance Raja Dance:

"You won’t hear Vijaya Anand sing on this record. Nor will you hear him play any of the instruments. He is the invisible presence behind each of these songs. He’s the Musical Director, here to dream up sequences and carefully produce sophisticated South Indian pop perfection." - David Byrne