Harris Jayaraj
Harris Jayaraj (born 8 January 1975) is an Indian film composer from Chennai, Tamil Nadu. He is best known for his melodies. He composes soundtracks predominantly for Tamil films, while also having composed for a few films in Telugu and two films in Hindi.
Since 2001, he has won 6 Filmfare Awards South and has received 20 Filmfare Awards South nominations. He has also won 6 Mirchi Music Awards, 5 Vijay Awards, 4 Tamil Nadu State Film Awards, 3 International Tamil Film Awards and Big FM Awards. He has been honoured with Kalaimamani Award from the Government of Tamil Nadu[1] and the Life Time Achievement Award from Konijeti Rosaiah, the Governor of Tamil Nadu.[2] In 2019, he was bestowed with the Dr. M.G.R. Educational and Research Institute Honorary Doctorate of Letters for his significant contributions to Tamil cinema music.
Harris Jayaraj was brought up in Chennai. His father is a Tamil Christian while his mother is from Madurai.[citation needed] He studied at Krishnaswamy Matric School. His father, S. M. Jayakumar, was a noted film guitarist and an assistant to Malayalam music director Shyam and later became a noted musician and film composer. At age six, Harris began his formal training in carnatic music.[4] His father wanted him to become a guitarist and made him learn classical guitar from Mr.A.Abdul Sattar.[5] Harris scored the highest mark in Asia on his 4th grade exam of Trinity College of Music, London.[6]
He started his music career as a guitarist in 1987 at age twelve.[7] He started playing keyboard and developed interest over synthesizers. He then started programming with his Roland MC-500 and went on to work as a programmer under more than twenty five music directors in Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and Malayalam, working in more than 600 projects till the year 2000.[8] He worked under noted composers including Raj–Koti, A. R. Rahman, Sadhu Kokila, Mani Sharma, Karthik Raja, Yuvan Shankar Raja and Vidyasagar.[9] While working as an additional programmer under A. R. Rahman, he composed music for various television commercials including a Coca-Cola commercial featuring actor Vijay.[10] In his early years, he admired music composers M. S. Viswanathan, A. R. Rahman and Hans Zimmer.
