Reinventing Tarantella Napoletana

Yesterday I caught a performance of an off-broadway play called Romeo and Bernadette, a twist on Shakespeare’s classic Romeo and Juliette. The performances were excellent, as was the music, which drew upon many Italian classic melodies. It inspired me to pull this work out of my archives and share here again, one of my remixes of an old Bollywood song that itself was inspired by a classic Italian tune, the Tarantella Napoletana. “Aaja Sanam” (“Come my love”) is from the movie Chori Chori starring Raj Kapoor and Nargis, some of the most influential actors of Indian Cinema, and was sung by esteemed singers of the era, Lata Mangeshkar and Manna Dey. One of the signature sounds in the original song is the accordion, which is likely the instrument you hear whenever you think of the Tarantella. The accordion was not only played within the confines of European culture but was also heavily used in a certain golden age of Hindi film music by composers such as composers like Shankar-Jaikeshan and S.D. Burman, amongst many others. My own father was a child of that era and developed a great love and skill for the instrument, and I grew up developing a soft corner for it as well as I watched him play from my own childhood. In this remixed version, the original accordion playing is not included as I changed the time signature from 6/8 to 4/4, but as the song has been slowed down, I placed high speed accordion vamping as a counterpoint to the speed to maintain the energy of the original accordion, while layering in sounds of the Greek bouzouki along with the electronic baseline and beats. Here’s to music having no borders.

I produced the video by sketching Raj Kapoor and Nargis on my iPad with Procreate and leveraging a Enlight Videoleap and Adobe After Effects.

Below is the original song that I remixed.