Chithra Iyer

Born to Drs Raja Durai and Rohini Iyer, Chitra Iyer has been singing since her childhood. She showed her musical leanings from a very young age. Chitra had her formal training in Hindustani music from Sri Mukund Kshirsagar of Gwalior Gharana, himself a student of Pt Jasraj. She also had her formal training in Carnatic music from a very early stage. Presently, she is training with Sri Vinayak Torvi..Chitra recorded her first album in 1984 for the music director Chandru, an album of Mookambika bhajans. She produced and composed music for her first album in 1993 of devotional songs on Udipi Krishna authored by Venkatraja Punichithaya. In 1997, for the first time, she recorded playback songs for Malayalam music directors Bernie and Ignatious. Subsequently, she went on to record numerous songs for music directors like Balabhaskar, Mohan Sitara, Deepak Dev, M Jayachandran, Bernie - Ignatius, Suresh Peters, Ramesh Narayan, Kanhangad Ramachandran, Jassi Gift, others. In the year 2000 she sang for AR Rahman in Kamal Hassan’s Thenali – a duet with Hariharan. This was her first Tamil playback song. She has recorded in a number of Tamil movies with A R Rahman, Vidyasagar, Bharadwaj, Yuvan Shankar Raja, Karthik Raja, Deva, Kumaran, and Sabesh Murali, since. Chitra has also recorded in Kannada films for Hamsalekha and Gurukiran and in Telugu for AR Rahman. She has recorded for Tamil and Malayalam tele-serials too. She has lent her voice to a couple of Indipop albums in Hindi with the Pop group AGOSH.

Credits : Chithra Iyer Website

Prepared by: Sreedevi Pillai