[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":256},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-nihal-nelson":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":218,"description":219,"died":220,"era":221,"extension":222,"heroImage":223,"imageCredit":224,"imageLicense":225,"imageSource":226,"meta":227,"navigation":228,"notable":228,"path":229,"roles":230,"seo":234,"sources":235,"stem":254,"translated":228,"url":238,"__hash__":255},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fnihal-nelson.md","Nihal Nelson",475,1946,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":209},"minimark",[11,25,28,33,36,39,45,48,52,59,66,69,73,150,186,189,193,196,199,203,206],[12,13,14,15,19,20,24],"p",{},"At twenty past eleven on the morning of 31 March 1963, the announcer Karunaratne Abeysekera introduced a record on Radio Ceylon with a sentence that has been quoted back at its subject ever since: \"Here is a new song and a new singer. This song and this singer will last forever.\" The song was ",[16,17,18],"strong",{},"ලස්සනට පිපුණු වන මල්"," ",[21,22,23],"em",{},"Lassanata Pipunu Wana Mal"," (\"the wild flower that bloomed so beautifully\"). The singer was a seventeen-year-old from Moratuwa with no formal music training whatever, who had written the melody himself.",[12,26,27],{},"Fifty-nine years later, when Nihal Nelson died, the BBC's Sinhala service headlined his obituary with the phrase that had followed him longest: the man who gave colour to the age of the cassette.",[29,30,32],"h2",{"id":31},"moratuwa-and-a-melody-of-his-own","Moratuwa, and a melody of his own",[12,34,35],{},"He was born on 9 January 1946 in Moratuwa, the only child of D. C. Hendrick, a businessman, and D. P. Weerawardena, an English teacher. He went first to Innocent Maria Mixed School — now Rawathawatte Roman Catholic College — and then to Moratu Maha Vidyalaya, where he sat his Advanced Levels in 1960 and where, in his own account, the whole thing started. It was a very large school, three or four thousand boys, and every Friday there was a literary association meeting at which somebody had to sing. His classmates pushed him forward often enough that he became, by degrees, the school's singer.",[12,37,38],{},"The songs he sang there were his own: he would write something down, put a tune to it and perform it. Asked much later whether he had ever studied music as a subject, he said no — he had simply stood near R. A. Chandrasena while Chandrasena taught other people, and picked it up by ear. \"You are asking a Sinhalese man who lives in Kompannaveediya whether he knows Tamil,\" he said. \"Live on the same patch of ground and you learn.\"",[12,40,41,42,44],{},"The route to Chandrasena ran through the musician A. J. Kareem, whom he met at a wedding in 1962. Kareem took him to Chandrasena; Chandrasena guided the recording of ",[21,43,23],{},", released by the SLBC as an EP, with words by Sarath Munasinghe — who later ordained as a monk — and Victor Ratnayake on violin in the studio band. Later in 1963 Chandrasena put him on stage at the Kandy Lake Club, then the place where a Sinhala singer's popularity was actually tested.",[12,46,47],{},"He was paid five rupees a night at first, and later twenty. He went up from Colombo by bus, changed clothes and ate at a restaurant in Kadugannawa, bought toffees and a bottle of nelli crush to take home, and still came back with ten rupees. Still in his teens he was sharing the Lake Club stage with Eddie Jayamanne, Rukmani Devi and Mohideen Baig; his own contemporaries there were Victor Ratnayake, H. R. Jothipala, M. S. Fernando and Anton Jones.",[29,49,51],{"id":50},"the-cassette","The cassette",[12,53,54,55,58],{},"The technology that made him arrived in 1978. Nelson was among the first Sri Lankan vocalists to release a cassette — ",[21,56,57],{},"Gune Ayyage Kamare"," — on Wijaya Ramanayake's Tharanga label, which had introduced the format to the country. He was later among the first in the region onto compact disc as well.",[12,60,61,62,65],{},"This matters more than it sounds. The cassette broke the grip of the radio grading panel and the record company on who got heard. It was cheap to make, cheap to buy, easy to copy, and it played in a bus, a boutique and a wedding hall. Nelson understood the new economics faster than almost anyone and simply kept making albums. His hundred-and-tenth, ",[21,63,64],{},"Nihal 110 Dot Com",", came out in 2000, recorded at the Sunflowers' studio at Mahawewa near Chilaw with the band playing and Neil Warnakulasooriya conducting.",[12,67,68],{},"His total is usually given as 113 albums, and both English and Sinhala Wikipedia — citing Sri Lankan press reports — call this the record for the most albums by a Sri Lankan artist. It is a striking figure and it is worth attributing rather than stating flatly: output totals in Sinhala music are notoriously elastic, and no independent register exists to check it against. Even so, the order of magnitude is the point. Neela Wickramasinghe, a contemporary of comparable fame, released about eight cassettes in her life.",[29,70,72],{"id":71},"the-songs-and-the-dancing","The songs, and the dancing",[12,74,75,76,79,80,19,83,86,87,19,90,93,94,19,97,100,101,19,104,107,108,19,111,114,115,19,118,121,122,19,125,128,129,19,132,135,136,19,139,142,143,19,146,149],{},"The repertoire is baila, comic song and ",[21,77,78],{},"shoka gee"," by turns, and it is built for a live crowd. ",[16,81,82],{},"කුක්කු කූක් කූ කුකුළා හඬනවා",[21,84,85],{},"Kukku Kook Ku Kukula Handanawa"," (\"cock-a-doodle-doo, the rooster is crowing\"), with its parallel version about what the newspapers print; ",[16,88,89],{},"සල්ලි මිටි ගණන් අරගෙන",[21,91,92],{},"Salli Miti Ganan Aragena"," (\"carrying bundles of money\"); ",[16,95,96],{},"බයිලා වෙන්දේසිය",[21,98,99],{},"Baila Wendesiya"," (\"the baila auction\"); ",[16,102,103],{},"සොමියට වරෙන් පුතා",[21,105,106],{},"Somiyata Waren Putha","; ",[16,109,110],{},"කිරි දුන්නේ දරුවන්ටයි",[21,112,113],{},"Kiri Dunne Daruwantai"," (\"the milk was given for the children\"); ",[16,116,117],{},"කව්ද මල්ලී",[21,119,120],{},"Kawda Malli"," (\"who is it, little brother\"), to his own words; ",[16,123,124],{},"රෝස මලකුයි නෙළුම් මලකුයි",[21,126,127],{},"Rosa Malakui Nelum Malakui"," (\"a rose and a lotus\"); ",[16,130,131],{},"ක්‍රිකට් තරගය",[21,133,134],{},"Cricket Tharagaya","; and a baila about Count Dracula. ",[16,137,138],{},"ලස්සන ඇස් දෙක",[21,140,141],{},"Lassana As Deka"," and ",[16,144,145],{},"කරුණා සුවඳ",[21,147,148],{},"Karuna Suwanda"," came from his long partnership with the lyricist Vernon Perera.",[12,151,152,153,156,157,160,161,160,164,160,167,160,170,160,173,160,176,160,179,142,182,185],{},"He also sang playback. His first film song was \"Kasi Basili Na\" in ",[21,154,155],{},"Pem Kurullo",", words by Chandradasa Fernando and music by Tony Weeratunga, and he went on to ",[21,158,159],{},"Sakvithi Suwaya",", ",[21,162,163],{},"Loka Horu",[21,165,166],{},"Rodaya",[21,168,169],{},"Hari Yanakota Ohoma Thamai",[21,171,172],{},"Sanda Wata Rantharu",[21,174,175],{},"Loku Thaththa",[21,177,178],{},"Mal Warusa",[21,180,181],{},"Valampuri",[21,183,184],{},"Diyamanthi",", including \"Hitha Honda Minihage\" for Gamini Fonseka on screen.",[12,187,188],{},"What made him unbeatable in a hall was the movement. Sarasaviya called him \"undefeated on the concert stage\", and meant it literally: over fifty years the other stars of the show circuit rose and faded while Nelson kept turning up, eventually sharing bills with the children and grandchildren of the people he had started with. He was frank that the dancing could not be manufactured. \"It has to happen by itself,\" he said. \"A singer isn't made by singing the words on a scrap of paper. You have to understand what they mean.\"",[29,190,192],{"id":191},"baila-and-its-critics","Baila and its critics",[12,194,195],{},"Nelson's genre spent most of the twentieth century under attack from Sri Lanka's cultural establishment, which regarded baila as vulgar, foreign and corrosive to a properly Sinhala art music. That condemnation was real, loud and printed. It is often remembered as something stronger — a ban — and that part does not stand up: no source supports a formal prohibition of baila. What the critics had was contempt, and contempt cannot compete with a cassette that costs thirty rupees.",[12,197,198],{},"The verdict went against them anyway. In 2013 the Musaeus College auditorium hosted \"වසර 50 යි, නිහාල් ඇවිත්\" — \"Fifty years, and Nihal has come\" — on 15 March, marking the exact half-century since Abeysekera's introduction. In 2015 his home town gave him the Moratupura Ratnavibhushana honour, and in January 2021 Moratuwa named the third lane of Rawathawatte after him.",[29,200,202],{"id":201},"the-end-of-the-run","The end of the run",[12,204,205],{},"He married Malini Sriyalatha on 16 May 1974; their son, Kanchana Tharanga, was born in 1978 and went into radio sound. Malini died in July 2020, and the interviews he gave afterwards were the interviews of a man who had lost the person he organised his life around.",[12,207,208],{},"Nihal Nelson died of a heart attack at his home in Moratuwa on 13 December 2022, aged seventy-six. He had been on the concert stage, more or less without a break, since the year before the first Sarasaviya awards were handed out. Whatever the exact album count turns out to be, no one has yet matched the run.",{"title":210,"searchDepth":211,"depth":211,"links":212},"",2,[213,214,215,216,217],{"id":31,"depth":211,"text":32},{"id":50,"depth":211,"text":51},{"id":71,"depth":211,"text":72},{"id":191,"depth":211,"text":192},{"id":201,"depth":211,"text":202},"9 January 1946","The Moratuwa singer who was introduced on air in 1963 as a voice that would last forever, and spent sixty years proving it — cassette-era baila king and, by most counts, the most recorded Sri Lankan artist of all.","13 December 2022","1960s-2020s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fnihal-nelson.webp","Sri Lanka Mirror","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fsrilankamirror.com\u002Fentertainment\u002Fveteran-singer-nihal-nelson-passes-away\u002F",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fnihal-nelson",[231,232,233],"Singer","Composer","Lyricist",{"title":5,"description":219},[236,239,242,245,248,251],{"title":237,"url":238},"Nihal Nelson — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FNihal_Nelson",{"title":240,"url":241},"නිහාල් නෙල්සන් — සිංහල විකිපීඩියා","https:\u002F\u002Fsi.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002F%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%92%E0%B7%84%E0%B7%8F%E0%B6%BD%E0%B7%8A_%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%99%E0%B6%BD%E0%B7%8A%E0%B7%83%E0%B6%B1%E0%B7%8A",{"title":243,"url":244},"වසර 50 යි, නිහාල් ඇවිත් — Sarasaviya, 7 March 2013","https:\u002F\u002Farchives.sarasaviya.lk\u002F2013\u002F03\u002F07\u002F?fn=sa13030722",{"title":246,"url":247},"කැසට් පට ගීත යුගය වර්ණවත් කළ නිහාල් නෙල්සන් ජීවන වේදිකාවට සමුදෙයි — BBC News සිංහල, 13 December 2022","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.bbc.com\u002Fsinhala\u002Farticles\u002Fce70ky3egrko",{"title":249,"url":250},"Veteran Sri Lankan vocalist Nihal Nelson has died — Colombo Gazette, 13 December 2022","https:\u002F\u002Fcolombogazette.com\u002F2022\u002F12\u002F13\u002Fveteran-sri-lankan-vocalist-nihal-nelson-has-died\u002F",{"title":252,"url":253},"Nihal Nelson releases 'Ransilu' — The Island, 11 February 2001","http:\u002F\u002Fwww.island.lk\u002F2001\u002F02\u002F11\u002Fleisur05.html","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fnihal-nelson","NxMvlIZNU39h0i9i0tLAH2fYUwzOTrHhDUq9hsNIqNY",1787999332883]