Kattassery Joseph Yesudas (born 10 Jan 1940) is an Indian playback singer and musician who sings Indian classical, devotional and cinematic songs. Yesudas has recorded more than 50,000 songs in a number of Indian languages, including Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, Oriya as well as Arabic, English, Latin and Russian during a career spanning more than five decades. He is often referred to as 'Gaanagandharvan' (The celestial singer).
Yesudas has performed in most Indian languages except for Punjabi, Assamese, Konkani and Kashmiri. He has also composed a number of Malayalam film songs during the 1970s and 1980s.
Yesudas won the National Award for the Best Male Playback Singer for a record eight times, the Filmfare Awards South five times and the State Award for the Best Playback singer forty-three times, given by the governments of Kerala, Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and West Bengal. He was awarded the Padma Sri in 1975, the Padma Bhushan in 2002 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2017 by the Government of India for his contributions towards the arts. He has recorded more than 50,000 songs in a six-decade career. In 2006, he sang 16 film songs on the same day at AVM Studio, Madras. As a result of all these accolades and recognition, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest singers in the history of Indian Music.
KJ Yesudas was born in Kochi, in the erstwhile Kingdom of Cochin, in a Latin Catholic Christian family to Augustine Joseph and Elizabeth Joseph. His father, a well known Malayalam classical musician and stage actor, was his first guru(teacher). Yesudas was the eldest of five children and was followed by three younger brothers - Antappan, Mani, Justin and a younger sister, Jayamma.
He started his academic music training at RLV Music Academy, Thrippunithura and completed the Ganabhooshanam course. Later, he studied at the Swathi Thirunal College of Music, Thiruvananthapuram under the tutelage of the Carnatic Music Maestro, KR Kumaraswamy Iyer and Semangudi Srinivasa Iyer but could not complete his studies due to financial constraints. For a brief period, he also studied music under Vechoor Harihara Subramania Iyer, after which he took advanced training from Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavatar.
In 2011, Yesudas completed his 50 years as a playback singer.
Yesudas is married to Prabha. Their marriage was on 01 Feb 1970. They have three sons viz. Vinod, Vijay and Vishal. Vijay is a musician who won the Kerala State Film Award for the Best Male Playback Singer in 2007, 2012 and 2018.
Tailpiece.
Got up at 6, the chores and was ready by a half past 9.
Kurup kochachhan's 'sanchayanam' is slated on the 14th and the 'adiyanthiram' on the 23rd as passed on by Gopu, his eldest son. I've told him that both, Lekha and I'd be attending the ceremony on the 23rd.
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