Lucky Ali is one of the few singers from the Indipop explosion of the late nineties who was genuinely talented, equipped with a distinctive voice and musical sensibility. His songs were about life, nature, journeys, and occasionally love, all of them tinged with a sort of sunny melancholy. Optimism in the middle of sadness, hope mixed with longing. Sunoh, his first album came out in 1996. The first time I saw it, I mistook it for a Rahman song. Because of the way the song was arranged – the bouncy percussion track, the strumming guitars and the unconventional nasal voice. The video had a sepia tint to it, something very different from the usual garish Anaida and Daler Mehndi videos that came our way.

It was very hard to fall in love with the rest of album that easily. The proprietor of the local music shop asked me not to buy it, much like he asked me not to buy Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Sangam when it came out, because it did not appeal to him, because he did not “get” it. Sunoh was kind of weird. Only one song had a video, for the rest of them, you had to let the tracks and the instruments seep into you you, bit by bit. The title song ‘Sunoh’ was catchy to a point, as was ‘Pyaar Ka Musafir’, but it did not stray from its theme one bit. The songs were constructed without mainstream pandering, the compositions weren’t mollycoddling the listener. A few years later, Silk Route would do something similar with their debut album Boondein, albeit in a more audience-friendly manner. But that time and year, Sunoh was one of its kind, an extraordinary debut.

Sifar, released in 1998, was Ali beating the sophomore blues by outdoing himself. I still do not understand why ‘Teri Yaadein’, the first song on the album, or ‘Mausam’, the most accessible one were not pushed out to video, instead of ‘Dekha Hai Aise Bhi’. Trust me, I love that song, but I always thought Sifar never became as popular as his first album because the video did not have the all-ages Bollywood-story appeal that ‘O Sanam’ had. I began listening to the first two albums again yesterday, and there’s no doubt that the songs on them albums were truly unlike anything Indian popular music had to offer.

If you listen closely, there’s a definite sound that binds all the songs in Sifar, a choice of arrangements that thematically links all the songs together. Notably, the unconventional use of percussion, creative guitaring and multiple wind instruments that I cannot quite put my finger on – the sound reminds me of bagpipes mixed with the oboe. Consider ‘Dil Aise Na Samjhna’, for example. Nearly no percussion, and the carnatic violin appears along with the guitar as the primary instrument; even a cello, at times. The tabla peeks in for a few seconds around 2:30, and then disappears. ‘Mil Jaan Se Kabhi’ is like Mike Oldfield-lite, the arrangements hopping from a muted tubular-bellish sound to string pads to Chinese flutes, recorders and other assorted wind instruments. The acoustic guitar and mandolin layer the main chorus, quickly seguing into by an electric guitar flourish atop a drum-roll that in turns makes way for a short piano melody (Is that really a piano? There’s an actual sliding note there). It drives me nuts trying to break down the song like this, but all these disparate sounds somehow work together without drawing too much attention to themselves. And it ends with an anguished howl backed by synth strings. Fucking awesome. Every song in Sifar has a distinct personality, a riff or a line that you can take away with you with every listening. Not many albums do that.

However, one wonders if Lucky Ali is soleley responsible for his unique sound. Part of the credit should definitely go to arranger and co-composer, his brother-in-law Mike McCleary. McCleary is based out of Australia, and he’s credited as arranger and guitarist on Sunoh, and as part of ‘The Lucky Ali Team’ on Sifar, the second album, along with lyricist Syed Aslam. His name appears on credits of songs here and there – additional arrangements on ‘Himalaya’ from AR Rahman’s Connections, a beautiful piano-only mood piece, and as producer on Rahman’s charity single ‘Pray For Me Brother’. But it’s last year’s release, an album called Classic Bollywood – Shaken Not Stirred, produced by McCleary and featuring five alternative Indian female singers on vocals that brought him some kind of formal recognition. Primarily because of the track ‘Khoya Khoya Chand’ was used in spectacular fashion in Bijoy Nambiar’s 2011 film Shaitan.

Coming back to Lucky Ali’s output post-Sifar, his output seems to have been largely Bollywoodised pap. He has taken to singing for films nearly full-time, beginning with Kaho Na Pyaar Hai in 2001. He went on to appear as the lead in Pooja Bhatt’s Sur (and singing all the songs himself) and Sanjay Gupta’s Kaante. He sang for Rahman too, both in Tamil and Hindi. He has released pop albums (presumably with McCleary in tow) almost every other year, and while you can find ear-friendly ditties and eye-candy videos accompanying said ditties, his singing has been confined to the pattern that he established in his first two albums, echoey nasal crooning that is supposed to exude sincerity and heartbreak. Barring the occasional flash of musical chutzpah, it has been 15 years of predictability. Not really a bad thing, but still feels like he did not go further than Sifar in terms of challenging audiences.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqqlw6YRhv8

The last time I really liked Lucky Ali, the time when he managed to surprise me was in the track ‘Tu Kaun Hai’ , used in the film Bhopal Express, starring Kay Kay Menon and Nethra Raghuraman. He sings the song very unlike his usual style, employing a lower pitch in the main verse. This coupled with the breathy sound that punctuates the song produces a somewhat unsettling – and striking – effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RMb_LlLnIU