K. J. Yesudas

Kattassery Joseph Yesudas is an Indian Carnatic musician and film playback singer. Yesudas sings Indian classical, devotional and cinematic songs. He has recorded more than 50,000 songs in a number of Indian languages as well as Russian, Arabic, Latin and English during a career spanning more than 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 (The Celestial Singer). He is considered to be a cultural icon of the Malayalam language - as well as of its ethnic group spread across the world - due largely to the fact that his songs have been profoundly ingrained into the minds of Malayalam speaking people for five decades.