WKCR announces a 24-hour birthday celebration for Lata Mangeshkar, broadcast on FM and HD radio and online all day on Thursday, September 28th. The special broadcast will run from the middle of Som do Brasil until the end of The African Show. The broadcast will preempt all regularly-scheduled Thursday shows.

Lata Mangeshkar (September 28, 1929-February 22, 2022) was one of the most celebrated and influential playback singers in India. Born in present day Madhya Pradesh, India with Marathi as her mother tongue, Mangeshkar sang in dozens of languages and dialects and professionally recorded tens of thousands of songs. She is only one of three singers to achieve the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor. Her earliest teachers, her father Deenanath Mangeshkar and Ustad Aman Ali Khan, trained her in Hindustani classical music at a young age. Though the bulk of her repertoire is film music, the influence of this training is evident: a masterful control of complex ragas and talas, a pitch so perfect Ustads Bade Gulam Ali Khan and Bismillah Khan marveled at her unwavering conformity to it, and her ability to craft a profoundly emotive atmosphere no matter the style or genre of the film. In her more popular songs like “Tujhe Dekha To Yeh Jaana Sanam'' and “Chalo Dildar Chale” or her renditions of more classical compositions like Meera bhajans or Ghazals, the sweetness of her voice unfolding in a rich array of swaras and gamakas shows a sense of love– either for the film, for her Hindu religion, or for singing itself. It’s no wonder she is known as the “Nightingale,” a testament to the eight decades she spent perfecting and sharing her craft with the world.

Our broadcast will feature both Maneshkar’s classics and lesser-known works, as well as special broadcasts and recordings from WKCR’s archive.