[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":248},["ShallowReactive",2],{"person-en-stanley-peiris":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"artistId":6,"birthYear":7,"body":8,"born":215,"description":216,"died":217,"era":218,"extension":219,"heroImage":220,"imageCredit":221,"imageLicense":222,"imageSource":223,"meta":224,"navigation":225,"notable":226,"path":227,"roles":228,"seo":232,"sources":233,"stem":246,"translated":225,"url":236,"__hash__":247},"peopleEn\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fstanley-peiris.md","Stanley Peiris",488,1941,{"type":9,"value":10,"toc":206},"minimark",[11,15,18,23,26,29,33,36,49,56,59,63,66,124,172,186,190,193,196,200,203],[12,13,14],"p",{},"One night in 1969 the broadcaster Vijaya Corea travelled up to Kandy to compere a dinner dance. The band on the stand was a local outfit called the Fortunes, and what stopped him was not the singing — there wasn't any. Two saxophones were playing the melody line together, in a blend nobody in Colombo was doing. One of the horns belonged to Rangith Perera. The other belonged to a young signals officer on leave from the Navy named Stanley Peiris.",[12,16,17],{},"Corea told him to stop hiding in the hills and come down to Colombo.",[19,20,22],"h2",{"id":21},"the-twin-saxophones","The twin saxophones",[12,24,25],{},"Weerasinghe Arachchilage Edward Stanley Peiris was born on 12 June 1941 in Kandy and went to St. Anthony's College — an institution he would return to years later as a teacher. He learned music at the M.G.C. institute in Kandy and then joined the Sri Lanka Navy, where he served as a signals officer before giving the career up for music altogether.",[12,27,28],{},"The Fortunes were his own band, formed in Kandy, and their whole identity was that they played instrumentals. This was a strange thing to be doing in the second half of the 1960s. Clarence Wijewardena had started up in Ratnapura only a few years earlier and the Sinhala pop boom that followed was built entirely on songs — a voice, a tune, words you could learn on the bus. An instrumental group had no obvious place in it. What the Fortunes had instead was the sound of Stanley and Rangith playing in unison, two saxophones treated as a single instrument. The press later called them the saxophone twins. Rangith Perera died at forty-four.",[19,30,32],{"id":31},"sea-avenue-one-morning","Sea Avenue, one morning",[12,34,35],{},"Corea did more than offer encouragement. According to a tribute written after Peiris's death by the journalist Prasad Gunewardene, he went to Gerald Wickremesooriya of the Children's Bookshop in Colombo Fort, who was by then producing records under the Sooriya label, and argued the case for recording an instrumental band. Wickremesooriya was reluctant: Sinhala pop songs were selling, and instrumentals were an untested idea.",[12,37,38,39,43,44,48],{},"Sooriya ran weekly auditions at Wickremesooriya's Colombo home — the address where the Moonstones, the Golden Chimes, M. S. Fernando, Desmond de Silva, Milton Mallawarachchi and a great many others were first heard. Peiris and the Fortunes were given a morning slot there, with Corea present at Wickremesooriya's insistence. The piece they chose to play was not their own: it was Clarence Wijewardena's ",[40,41,42],"strong",{},"කළු කෙල්ලේ"," ",[45,46,47],"em",{},"Kalu Kelle"," (\"dark girl\"), written for Indrani Perera, played on the two saxophones.",[12,50,51,52,55],{},"They got the contract. The record that followed is described by Sooriya's own history as the first instrumental record of Sinhala pop made in Sri Lanka — a disc with no singer on it at all, in a market that had never asked for one. The Fortunes' ",[45,53,54],{},"Tika Venta Naala"," survives as an example of what the band actually sounded like.",[12,57,58],{},"Years later, directing music for a session, Peiris turned to the producer and said of Corea: \"If not for this man Vijaya, I would not be directing music for your son.\"",[19,60,62],{"id":61},"the-melody-man","The melody man",[12,64,65],{},"What happened next is the part of Peiris's career that Sri Lankans actually remember, even when they do not know his name. He stopped being a bandleader and became a composer — the man other people's hits belonged to.",[12,67,68,69,43,72,75,76,43,79,82,83,43,86,89,90,43,93,96,97,43,100,82,103,43,106,109,110,43,113,116,117,43,120,123],{},"The list is long and unusually varied for one composer. For Milton Mallawarachchi he wrote ",[40,70,71],{},"හද පතුලේ",[45,73,74],{},"Hada Pathule"," (\"in the depths of the heart\"), ",[40,77,78],{},"අමා රන් හැඟුම් පිරී",[45,80,81],{},"Ama Ran Hangum Piri",", ",[40,84,85],{},"අතීතයේ පවා",[45,87,88],{},"Atheethaye Pawa"," (\"even in the past\") and ",[40,91,92],{},"වීදි කොනේ මාවත",[45,94,95],{},"Veedi Kone Mawatha"," (\"the lane at the street corner\") — several of them to words by the broadcaster-lyricist K. D. K. Dharmawardena, and others to Ajantha Ranasinghe's. For Nanda Malini, working with Sunil Ariyaratne's lyrics, he set ",[40,98,99],{},"පෙරදා මහ රෑ",[45,101,102],{},"Perada Maha Ra",[40,104,105],{},"උක් දඬු",[45,107,108],{},"Uk Dandu"," and ",[40,111,112],{},"අවුරුදු දෙදහස් පන්සීයක්",[45,114,115],{},"Awurudu Dedahas Panseeyak"," (\"two thousand five hundred years\"). Clarence Wijewardena, the man whose song had won Peiris his audition, later sang ",[40,118,119],{},"දුව මා වගේ",[45,121,122],{},"Duwa Ma Wage"," (\"daughter, like me\") to a Peiris melody.",[12,125,126,127,43,130,133,134,43,137,140,141,43,144,147,148,43,151,154,155,43,158,161,162,109,165,43,168,171],{},"There are more: ",[40,128,129],{},"කෙදිනද කූඩු හදන්නට එන්නේ",[45,131,132],{},"Kedinada Kudu Hadannata Enne"," for Niranjala Sarojini, ",[40,135,136],{},"ඉගිල්ලිලා යන්න යං",[45,138,139],{},"Igillila Yanna Yan"," for Chandrika Siriwardena, ",[40,142,143],{},"සුවඳැති කුසුමක සුසිනිඳු",[45,145,146],{},"Suwandathi Kusumaka Susinidu"," for Neela Wickramasinghe and Mervin Perera, ",[40,149,150],{},"නෙතින් නෙත බලාලා",[45,152,153],{},"Nethin Netha Balala"," for Rohana Bogoda, and ",[40,156,157],{},"සිතින් මා නොසැලී",[45,159,160],{},"Sithin Ma Nosali"," for T. M. Jayaratne. Later still came Nirosha Virajini's ",[40,163,164],{},"ඇහිපිල්ලමක් අතර",[40,166,167],{},"සීගිරි ගීයක්",[45,169,170],{},"Sigiri Geeyak"," (\"a Sigiriya song\").",[12,173,174,175,178,179,109,182,185],{},"He came to film music in 1981 with ",[45,176,177],{},"Saranga",", and scored ",[45,180,181],{},"Soora Saradiel",[45,183,184],{},"Baisikalaya"," after it. On his sessions the flute was usually played by V. Hemapala Perera, blind since childhood and the radio-graded flute voice on a large share of the Sinhala recordings of that era.",[19,187,189],{"id":188},"how-much-did-he-actually-write","How much did he actually write?",[12,191,192],{},"Nobody knows, and this is worth being honest about. The tribute published after his death credits him with directing music for 700 cassettes and more than four thousand songs. His English Wikipedia entry gives over 700 albums and scores for about 6,600 songs. The same article says his career spanned more than forty years while the tribute, in different paragraphs, calls it thirty-three years and then nearly forty. Output figures in Sinhala music are notoriously elastic, and Peiris's are no exception. What can be said without argument is that he was one of the most heavily recorded composers of the cassette era, and that the range — pop, film, devotional, playback for singers with nothing in common — was unusually wide.",[12,194,195],{},"He was also, by every account, a teacher rather than a guru who hoarded what he knew. At St. Anthony's College in Kandy one of his students was Rookantha Gunathilake; Peiris later formed the band Galaxy with Gunathilake, Mahinda Bandara and Keerthi Pasquel. In 2000 he helped the young composer Dinesh Subasinghe at the start of his career. He recorded with W. D. Amaradeva.",[19,197,199],{"id":198},"the-last-year","The last year",[12,201,202],{},"Peiris fell ill with cancer, and a fundraising concert was held for him at the BMICH in the month before he died. He thanked the organisers from his sickbed and told them he expected to recover. He died at his home in Kandy on 13 October 2002. Sources give his birth date as 12 June 1941, though the infobox on his own Wikipedia entry contradicts itself and says the thirteenth.",[12,204,205],{},"The obituary that carries most of what we know about his life ends not with a summary of his work but with a warning about it: that the recordings of dead Sri Lankan musicians were routinely pirated, and that the families left behind had no practical way to protect them. It is a strange note for a tribute to close on, and a fair one. A composer who wrote thousands of melodies and left almost no written record of which ones were his is exactly the kind of figure a music archive exists for.",{"title":207,"searchDepth":208,"depth":208,"links":209},"",2,[210,211,212,213,214],{"id":21,"depth":208,"text":22},{"id":31,"depth":208,"text":32},{"id":61,"depth":208,"text":62},{"id":188,"depth":208,"text":189},{"id":198,"depth":208,"text":199},"12 June 1941","The saxophonist from Kandy whose twin-horn instrumental became the first Sinhala pop record without a singer, and who then spent thirty years writing melodies for everybody else.","13 October 2002","1960s-2000s","md","\u002Fimages\u002Fpeople\u002Fstanley-peiris.webp","ABPTV (YouTube)","Unverified — fallback source","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.youtube.com\u002Fwatch?v=QltXrbu14-A",{},true,false,"\u002Fen\u002Fpeople\u002Fstanley-peiris",[229,230,231],"Composer","Musician","Music Director",{"title":5,"description":216},[234,237,240,243],{"title":235,"url":236},"Stanley Peiris — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FStanley_Peiris",{"title":238,"url":239},"King of 'Saxophone Twins' — Prasad Gunewardene, InfoLanka","http:\u002F\u002Fwww.infolanka.com\u002Forg\u002Fsrilanka\u002Fenter\u002F24.htm",{"title":241,"url":242},"Sooriya Records — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FSooriya_Records",{"title":244,"url":245},"Vijaya Corea — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FVijaya_Corea","en\u002Fpeople\u002Fstanley-peiris","DgJ6h7C5yCnY2yLK1tANG_PnupitT3MglYNwT-cgr1w",1787999333719]