Kattassery Joseph Yesudas (born 10 January 1940) is an Indian classical
musician and playback singer. Yesudas sings Indian classical,
devotional, and popular music. He has recorded more than 50,000 songs in
many languages including Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu,
Bengali, Gujarati, Oriya, Marathi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tulu, Malay,
Russian, Arabic, Latin and English during a career spanning five
decades. He has performed in most Indian languages except Assamese,
Konkani and Kashmiri. He also composed a number of Malayalam film songs
in the 1970s and 1980s. Yesudas is fondly called Gana Gandharvan
(English: The Celestial Singer).Yesudas has won the National Award for
the Best Male Playback Singer seven times (the most by any Indian
singer) and the State Award for the Best Playback Singer 43 times, which
consists of awards by the state governments of Kerala, Tamil Nadu,
Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and West Bengal. He was awarded Padma Shri in
1975 and Padma Bhushan in 2002 by the Government of India for his
contributions to the arts. In 2011 Yesudas was honoured with the CNN-IBN
outstanding achievement award for being India's celestial singer having
recorded over 50,000 songs in a five-decade career.In 2006, he sang 16
film songs in four South Indian languages on the same day at AVM Studio,
Chennai. |