[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":245},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-m-k-rocksamy":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":210,"description":211,"died":212,"era":213,"extension":214,"heroImage":215,"imageCredit":216,"imageLicense":217,"imageSource":218,"meta":219,"navigation":220,"notable":221,"path":222,"roles":223,"seo":227,"sources":228,"stem":243,"translated":220,"url":218,"__hash__":244},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fm-k-rocksamy.md","M. K. Rocksamy",445,1932,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":202},"minimark",[11,24,27,32,39,42,49,53,56,59,62,66,73,83,160,178,182,185,192,199],[12,13,14,15,19,20,23],"p",{},"Somewhere in the small hours, in a house on Balagala Road in Handala, a man would wake up, reach for a sheet of paper and start whistling. Two vacuum flasks stood ready in the room, one filled with tea and one with coffee, because his wife knew he would not stop to make either. He wrote the melody down as he whistled it. The tune for ",[16,17,18],"em",{},"Sathuta Shoke Jaya Parade",", from the fishing-village film ",[16,21,22],{},"Dheewarayo",", was written that way — he sat up out of sleep and had it on paper before he was properly awake.",[12,25,26],{},"The man was M. K. Rocksamy, and for most of his working life almost nobody in the audience knew his name. That is the point of him. Sinhala film songs of the 1960s and 1970s did not arrive out of the air; a room full of players made them, overnight, session after session, and Rocksamy was one of the two or three musicians most likely to be in that room.",[28,29,31],"h2",{"id":30},"the-name-he-assembled","The name he assembled",[12,33,34,35,38],{},"His birth certificate said Rock Christy Samy. The initials came later, and he built them himself, out of his parents: his mother was Maria, his father Kolande Samy, so the M and the K went in front and he became M. K. Rocksamy — this according to his widow, Indrani, who told the story to ",[16,36,37],{},"Sarasaviya"," in 2015. English-language sources usually give the fuller form Maria Kolande Rock Christysamy.",[12,40,41],{},"He was born on 13 September 1932 in Elpitiya, into a Tamil Catholic family. Accounts of where the family came from vary in their detail — English Wikipedia says the family came from Goa and that both parents were born in Pondicherry — but they agree on the important part, which is that the house was full of instruments. His mother played harmonium and violin. He learned tabla and saxophone first, went to school at Anderson College in Slave Island, and played football well enough to earn colours.",[12,43,44,45,48],{},"Sources also differ on when he entered Radio Ceylon. One account has him joining the station's orchestra at seventeen, which would be 1949; another says he joined as a violinist in 1953; the ",[16,46,47],{},"Sunday Observer",", writing in 2006, says he joined \"in the 60s\" and stayed fifteen years. What nobody disputes is that he is the musician credited with bringing the saxophone into Radio Ceylon's Sinhala Oriental Music Orchestra, and that he switched his main instrument to violin after studying Carnatic music under a teacher named Sangaralingam at Colpetty. He is said to have practised eight hours a day. Colleagues said he could walk into a live broadcast and play without rehearsal.",[28,50,52],{"id":51},"the-man-behind-the-singer","The man behind the singer",[12,54,55],{},"If you listened to Sinhala radio between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s, you heard him constantly without being told so. He played on sessions for Sunil Santha, W. D. Amaradeva, Nanda Malini, Mohideen Baig, Sujatha Attanayake, Victor Ratnayake, G. S. B. Rani and Latha Walpola. A photograph from the SLBC studios shows him playing for the singer Chandra de Silva alongside Ariyadasa on tabla, Stanley Fernando, Sarath Wimalaweera, Mervyn Wijewardena — and a saxophonist the caption calls T. F. Latheef.",[12,57,58],{},"That last name matters. A much-repeated description of the era's session world names three men — Rocksamy, the Hawaiian guitarist Patrick Denipitiya and T. K. Latiff, a Tamil, a Sinhalese and a Muslim — as the players who turned up at most Sinhala film song and background-music recordings for close to thirty years, arranging as much as they played. It is a story told inside the profession rather than documented in a book, and even the spelling of Latiff's name shifts between sources. But it describes something real: a tiny pool of freelance musicians who supplied nearly all the country's film music, moving between the studios at Wattala, Kandana, Kelaniya, Thimbirigasyaya and the Government Film Unit at Narahenpita, and working through the night because studio time was cheapest then.",[12,60,61],{},"In the late 1950s Rocksamy joined R. Muttusamy's film orchestra at the Sundera Murugan Nayagam studio in Kandana. That was the apprenticeship.",[28,63,65],{"id":64},"sansare-and-the-promotion-nobody-wanted","Sansare, and the promotion nobody wanted",[12,67,68,69,72],{},"His break came through a death. In 1962 the music director B. S. Perera died during the making of Shanthi Kumar's ",[16,70,71],{},"Sansare",", and Rocksamy was handed three of its songs to direct. He never went back to being only a player.",[12,74,75,76,79,80,82],{},"How many films he scored afterwards is genuinely unsettled. The film database films.lk lists thirty-one Sinhala features with him as music director, plus the Tamil film ",[16,77,78],{},"Naan Ungal Thozhan",". English Wikipedia says more than sixty Sinhala films and three Tamil ones. The ",[16,81,47],{}," obituary-style profile says \"seventy odd Sinhala and Tamil films\". Take the range and leave it there; the exact number is one of the many counts in Sinhala music that nobody has ever properly audited.",[12,84,85,86,88,89,88,92,88,95,88,98,88,101,104,105,109,110,113,114,109,117,120,121,109,124,127,128,109,131,134,135,109,138,141,142,109,145,148,149,109,152,155,156,159],{},"The films themselves are the commercial cinema of the period — ",[16,87,22],{},", ",[16,90,91],{},"Chandali",[16,93,94],{},"Maha Re Hamuwu Sthriya",[16,96,97],{},"Haralakshaya",[16,99,100],{},"Ranrasa",[16,102,103],{},"Sudu Sande Kalu Wala",". The songs outlived them. ",[106,107,108],"strong",{},"මං රික්ෂෝ කාරයා"," ",[16,111,112],{},"Man Riksho Karaya"," (\"I am a rickshaw man\"), sung by H. R. Jothipala to a lyric by Karunaratne Abeysekera, is his; so is ",[106,115,116],{},"නිදහස් කාහල නාදය",[16,118,119],{},"Nidahas Kahala Nadaya"," (\"the trumpet-call of freedom\") for Milton Perera, the devotional ",[106,122,123],{},"බුදු සාමිනේ",[16,125,126],{},"Budu Samine"," for Indrani Senaratne, ",[106,129,130],{},"ජීවන විල මැද",[16,132,133],{},"Jeewana Vila Mada"," and ",[106,136,137],{},"සඳ රැජිණියනේ",[16,139,140],{},"Sanda Rajiniyane"," for Sujatha Attanayake, ",[106,143,144],{},"ආරාධනා සංසාරයේ",[16,146,147],{},"Aradhana Sansaraye"," for Latha Walpola, and ",[106,150,151],{},"ගමනේ ගිම් නිවූ එදා",[16,153,154],{},"Gamane Gim Niwu Eda"," for Milton Mallawarachchi. Abeysekera and Dharmasiri Gamage wrote more of his lyrics than anyone else. A new-year song usually given as ",[16,157,158],{},"Sinhala Avurudda Ewilla"," is still played every April.",[12,161,162,163,166,167,170,171,109,174,177],{},"One curiosity is worth recording. Rocksamy composed what is described as the first free-standing Hindi song written for a Sinhala film: ",[16,164,165],{},"Ek Kali Thi",", in the film ",[16,168,169],{},"Cyril Malli",", written by Ravilal Wimaladharma and sung in Hindi by Milton Mallawarachchi. He also set its Sinhala twin, ",[106,172,173],{},"මල් කැකුලී ගෝමලී මනාලී",[16,175,176],{},"Mal Kekuli Gomali Manali",", which H. R. Jothipala sang.",[28,179,181],{"id":180},"no-barriers","No barriers",[12,183,184],{},"He refused to stay inside one music. He played Carnatic concerts. He played jazz fusion with the Adrian Ferdinands Combo and rock fusion with the guitarist Kumar Navaratnam at the John de Silva Theatre, at a time when a film music director doing either was unusual. He worked on live music programmes for ITN and Rupavahini.",[12,186,187,188,191],{},"He met Indrani on the set of ",[16,189,190],{},"Sekaya",", where she was singing in the chorus alongside Ranjani Perera while Sujatha Attanayake and Milton Perera took the solo lines; the two of them sang the backing line about sand and cement. They married on 24 November 1974, and had three children. Indrani, who passed the Radio Ceylon grading examinations as a B-grade singer while he was alive, remembers a man who gave away a new sarong to a beggar on his fiftieth birthday and then asked her not to shout about it.",[12,193,194,195,198],{},"He died in Colombo on 30 November 1988, aged fifty-six. His widow likes to point out that he was born on a Wednesday, married on a Wednesday and died on a Wednesday. Five years after his death, in 1993, a memorial concert called ",[16,196,197],{},"Wayu Gee Rawa"," was staged at the Elphinstone Theatre. There has not been another one on that scale.",[12,200,201],{},"His name is not on the records. His playing is on hundreds of them.",{"title":203,"searchDepth":204,"depth":204,"links":205},"",2,[206,207,208,209],{"id":30,"depth":204,"text":31},{"id":51,"depth":204,"text":52},{"id":64,"depth":204,"text":65},{"id":180,"depth":204,"text":181},"13 September 1932","The violinist, saxophonist and tabla player who spent thirty years in the back row of Sinhala film music sessions before becoming one of its busiest music directors.","30 November 1988","1950s-1980s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fm-k-rocksamy.webp","Films.lk","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.films.lk\u002Fsinhala-cinema-artist-mk-rocksamy-1162.html",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fm-k-rocksamy",[224,225,226],"Musician","Music Director","Composer",{"title":5,"description":211},[229,232,234,237,240],{"title":230,"url":231},"M. K. Rocksamy — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FM._K._Rocksamy",{"title":233,"url":218},"M.K. Rocksamy — films.lk (Digital Identity of Sinhala Cinema)",{"title":235,"url":236},"Virtuoso musician, by Mahes Perera — Sunday Observer, 3 December 2006","https:\u002F\u002Farchives.sundayobserver.lk\u002F2006\u002F12\u002F03\u002Fspe09.asp",{"title":238,"url":239},"රොක්සාමි උපන්නෙත්, විවාහ වුණෙත්, මිය ගියෙත් බදාදා (interview with Indrani Rocksamy) — Sarasaviya, 26 February 2015","http:\u002F\u002Farchives.sarasaviya.lk\u002F2015\u002F02\u002F26\u002F?fn=sa15022633",{"title":241,"url":242},"Patrick Denipitiya — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FPatrick_Denipitiya","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fm-k-rocksamy","uAPodB8htMNJj70DRHrERqjdEYIQr09acFuO6CFyZH0",1787999332492]