Bollywood Brothers, The

The brother team of Kalyanji Virji Shah and Anandji Virji Shah scored numerous Hindi soundtracks, 27 excerpts (spanning 1954 to 1980, though mostly from the 1970s) getting collected for this smartly chosen two-CD compilation. Even by the standards of the vintage Bollywood genre, this is maniacally, almost furiously eclectic stuff. James Bond chase-scene guitar and orgasmic sighs bump heads with son-of-Shaft funk rhythms and glide into wistful Subcontinental folk tunes in the blink of an eye -- not just from track to track, but within many of the songs themselves. Pour on some of the high female vocals (Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar being the singers most apt to be recognized by non-Indian listeners), stray sitar twangs, and shamelessly silly boisterous chants common to many Indian musicals, and you have some grand if somewhat exhausting East-West fusions. It's true that some of the tunes are cloyingly sentimental, but even those will often unexpectedly break into something that takes, at least to Western ears not accustomed to the form, downright zany turns for the more dynamic and experimental. As for the featured vocalists, precious female singers are frequent but not dominant, some rather earthier and rootsier males also getting their chance to pace the tunes. Mainstream Indian entertainment in its day, it now seems stranger than all but the strangest psychedelia. Though the brothers' career is perhaps too long and prolific to cover extensively with the space allotted in the liner notes, these do include a brief overview of their work and track-by-track annotation. ~ Richie Unterberger|