Monday, August 19, 2013
USTAD ALI AKBAR KHAN (April, 14 1922 – June, 18
2009), often referred to as Khan Sahib or by the title Ustad (master),
was a Hindustani classical musician of the Maihar gharana, known
for his virtuosity in playing the sarod. Khan was instrumental in
popularizing Indian classical music in the West, both as a performer
(often in conjunction with Sitar maestro Ravi Shankar), and as a
teacher. He established a music school in Calcutta in 1956, and
the Ali Akbar College of Music in 1967, which is now located in San
Rafael, California and has a branch in Basel, Switzerland. Khan also
composed several classical ragas and film scores. He
was a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Music at the University of
California, Santa Cruz.
Trained as a musician and instrumentalist by his father, Allauddin
Khan, Khan first came to America in 1955 on the invitation of violinist Yehudi
Menuhin and later settled in California. Khan was nominated for
five Grammy Awards and was accorded India's second highest civilian
honor, the Padma Vibhushan, in 1989. He has also won a MacArthur
Fellowship and theNational Endowment for the Arts's National Heritage
Fellowship.
Ali Akbar Khan, after years of rigorous training gave his debut
performance at a music conference in Allahabad in 1936, at the age of
13. Three years later, in December 1939, he accompanied Ravi Shankar on the
sarod during the latter's debut performance at the same conference; this was
the first of many jugalbandis (duets) between the two
musicians. In 1938 Khan gave his first recital on All India Radio (AIR),
Bombay (accompanied on the tabla by Alla Rakha), and starting in January
1940, he gave monthly performances on AIR, Lucknow. Finally in 1944, both
Shankar and Khan left Maihar to start their professional careers as musicians;
Shankar went to Bombay, while Khan became the youngest Music Director for
AIR, Lucknow and was responsible for solo performances and composing for the
radio orchestra.
In 1943, on his father's recommendation, Khan was appointed a
court musician for the Maharaja of Jodhpur, Hanwant Singh. There,
he taught and composed music besides giving recitals and was accorded the title
of Ustad by the Maharaja. When the princely states were wound
down with India's independence in 1947 and Hanwant Singh died in a plane crash
in 1948, Khan moved to Bombay.
In Bombay, he won acclaim as a composer of several film scores,
including Chetan Anand's Aandhiyan, Satyajit Ray's Devi, Merchant-Ivory's The
Householder, and Tapan Sinha's Kshudhita Pashan ("Hungry
stones"), for which he won the "Best Musician of the Year"
award. He also played Sarod for a song in 1955 film Seema which had the music
composed by Shankar Jaikishan. Later in 1993, he would score some of the music
for Bernardo Bertolucci Little Buddha.
Beginning in 1945, Khan also started recording a series of 78
rpm disks (which could record about three minutes of music) at the HMV Studios
in Bombay. For one such record he conceived a new composition Raga
Chandranandan ("moonstruck"), based on four evening
ragas, Malkauns, Chandrakauns, Nandakauns and Kaushi
Kanada. This record was a huge success in India, and the raga found a worldwide
audience when a 22-minute rendition was re-recorded for the Master
Musician of India LP in 1965 − one of Khan's seminal recordings.
He performed in India and traveled extensively in the West. In
1956, Khan founded the Ali Akbar College of Music in Calcutta,
with the mission to teach and spread Indian classical music. He founded another
school of the same name in Berkeley, California in 1967 and later
moved it to San Rafael, California.[10] Khan performed in Boston
withShankar Ghosh in 1969 for the Peabody Mason Concert series.
In 1985 he founded another branch of the Ali Akbar College of Music in Basel, Switzerland.
Khan was the first Indian musician to record an LP album of Indian
classical music in the United States and to play sarod on American television.
Khan has participated in a number of classic jugalbandi pairings,
most notably with Ravi Shankar, Nikhil Banerjee and violinist L.
Subramaniam. A few recordings of duets withVilayat Khan also exist. He
also collaborated with Western musicians. In August 1971, Khan performed
at Madison Square Garden for the Concert for Bangladesh, along
with Ravi Shankar, Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty; other
musicians at the concert included George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Eric
Clapton and Ringo Starr. A live album and a movie of the event were
later released.
Khan was based in the United States for the last four decades of
his life. He toured extensively until he was prevented from doing so by ill-health
in the period prior to his death from renal failure.
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