He won the National Award with his first stint in the Hindi Film Industry. His work in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam was described as one of the best albums since Utsav and he followed his success story on the grand scale of Devdas where his work spoke for itself. And all you guys and gals out there get no brownie points for guessing that we are talking about none other than music director Ismail Darbar. It was none other than Sanjay Leela Bhansali who was able to extract the best out of him as Devdas and Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam remain undoubtedly as his best work till date. He comes from a family of four generation musicians. Born to noted clarinet and saxophone player Husain, he was initially trained by his father and went on to learn voilin. He went on to learn music from Pandit Ramprasad Sharma, the late father of composer Pyarelal and later on from Ganesh (Pandit’s son), who scored music in the ’60s and ’70s era. But it was long before he would taste any success with lady luck. He composed music for a TV serial for Zee TV and an album with Zee Music which never saw the light of the day. He worked for nine years as a session violist for leading music directors Laxmikant Pyarelal, Kalyanji Anandji, Bappi Lahiri, Rajesh Roshan, Anand-Milind, Nadeem-Shravan, Jatin-Lalit and even A.R.Rahman. He was recommended to SLB by the singer Kunal and since the director had seen his work with Jatin-Lalit while filming Khamoshi: The Musical, SLB asked him to churn out some tunes. Bhansali rejected the initial lot of the tunes and liked a song so much that it became the title song of his next movie. The music of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam or HDDCS is touted as evergreen. It’s been nine years since the movie released but songs like ‘tadap tadap ke‘ and ‘aankhon ki gustakhiyaan‘ are still fresh in memory. The music was worked on for two years, extensively exploring the culture and traditions of Gujarat. This movie fetched him the R D Burman award for fresh talent in the music industry award for 1999 while also getting him the Filmfare award for Best Music Director. The music maestro was able to churn out many hummable tunes in the Kirti Reddy-Abhishek Bachchan movie Tera Jadoo Chal gaya, and also worked on Deewangee. 3 years since they created magic with music, the Bhansali-Ismail duo were back with the extravagant Devdas. Once again the music was mint fresh, totally original and backed by heart touching lyrics and excellent cinematography as well as choreography. The movie won many awards at all the leading award shows and took Indian cinema to a global audience via the Cannes Film Festival of 2002, and catapulting Aishwarya Rai to immense international stardom. Ismail worked on Baaz, Shakti and Husn, but only his work in Kisna was regarded as good even as it fell miles behind the success story of HDDCS and Devdas. he has since been seen on one of the leading Indian reality TV shows regarding music talent on Zee TV. Though there is no information if he is in any way associated with SLB’s Saawariya, we wish him a lot of success and a great future ahead.