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Harris Jayaraj (born 8 January 1975) is an Indian film composer. He has written scores and soundtracks for Tamil, Telugu and Hindi films.Harris Jayaraj hails from a pious Christian Nadar family from Tirunelveli and was born and brought up in Chennai. Harris studied at Krishnaswamy Matric School, K.K.Nagar. 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 the age of six Harris began his formal training in carnatic music. His father wanted him to become a guitarist and made him learn classical guitar. Harris scored the highest mark in Asia on his 4th grade exam of Trinity College of Music, London. He has the privilege of being the first Indian to be the highest scorer in Asia.He started his music career as a guitarist in 1987 at the age of twelve. After befitting as an ample guitar player, 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 and musician under more than twenty five music directors in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Bengali and Oriya, working in more than 600 projects till the year 2000. He worked under noted composers including Raj-Koti, A. R. Rahman, Mani Sharma, Karthik Raja, Yuvan Shankar Raja, Vidyasagar. While working as an additional programmer under Rahman, he composed music for various television commercials including the famous Coca-Cola commercial featuring actor Vijay. In his early years, he admired music composers M. S. Viswanathan, percussionist Aruljothi Balagopal, A. R. Rahman and Hans Zimmer
Harris ventured into film scoring with Gautham Menon's Minnale. The album was well received, particularly the song Vaseegara turned out as a sensational hit. He received the Filmfare award for Best Music Director in his very first movie, breaking the 9 years continuous record of A. R. Rahman. The following Tamil movie albums 12B and Majunu met with high acclaim and praise. His Minnale score was later used in the Hindi version, titled Rehnaa Hai Terre Dil Mein also directed by Gautham Menon. He then worked in the movie Lesa Lesa directed by Priyadarshan. For the first time in India the title song of the movie Lesa Lesa was released as a single prior to the album release date. Harris made his debut in Tollywood with Vasu, which received lots of appreciation and gained him lots of fans in Andhra Pradesh as well. With his back to back successful albums Samurai, Saamy and Kovil Harris emerged as a music director of reckoning in Kollywood. He received Filmfare Best Music Director, Tamil Nadu State Film Award for Best Music Director and ITFA Best Music Director Award for Kaakha Kaakha, starring Suriya and Jyothika. This film directed by Gautham Menon was a huge blockbuster and the songs met with great critical acclaim. Gautham Menon remade the movie as Gharshana in Telugu which had two new songs apart from the Tamil version to suit the taste of Telugu audience. The song Uyirin Uyire reused as Cheliya Cheliya in Telugu and Khwabon Khwabon in Hindi is considered as one of the biggest sensational hit of all time.