Sunday, October 6, 2013
USTAD
IMRAT KHAN (born
17 November 1935) is a leading sitar and surbahar player.
He is the younger brother of sitar maestro Ustad Vilayat Khan.
Imrat was born in Calcutta into a
family of musicians tracing its pedigree back for several generations, to the
court musicians of the Mughal rulers. His father was Enayat
Khan (1895–1938), recognised as a leading sitar and surbahar player of his
time, as had been his grandfather, Imdad Khan (1848–1920), before
him. His father died when Imrat was a child, so he was raised by his mother,
Bashiran Begum and her father, singer Bande Hassan Khan. In 1944, the family
moved with rising star Vilayat Khan, Imrat's elder brother,
to Bombay where both the brothers learned extensively from
uncle Wahid Khan, Enayat Khan's brother. Wahid Khan was one of
the greatest surbahar players of his generation and a top-level sitar player,
and taught Imrat on the instruments in the family style, known as the
Imdadkhani gharana (school), or Etawah Gharana, after a village
outside Agra where Imdad Khan lived.
In 1952 Vilayat and Imrat moved in together
in Calcutta. They performed together for many years. From the 1960s
onwards, Imrat has performed and recorded solo, playing both sitar and
surbahar.
For decades, Imrat has recorded extensively on
both his instruments. His full performance practice starts with a surbahar alap
in dhrupad ang (embellished with more romantic touches),
followed by a shorter alap on the sitar leading into gat in traditional
Imdadkhani style. (Sitar players such as Ravi Shankar and Nikhil
Banerjee added bass strings to their sitars to achieve at least some of
the surbahar's lower range on a single instrument).
He has toured in Europe, the Americas,
and East and Southeast Asia. Surbahar players are rare today,
and Imrat is the main living exponent.
Imrat has five
sons, Nishat, Irshad, Wajahat and Shafaatullah,and
Azmat Khan , now only eight; the first four sons are all classical musicians:
Nishat plays the sitar, Wajahat concentrates on thesarod and Shafaatullah
is accomplished on sitar, tabla, and surbahar. The surbahar
tradition is largely upheld by Irshad (also a sitar player), who has made some
very traditional solo recordings.
Imrat Khan currently spends a portion of each
year teaching classical Indian music and instructing sitar students
at Washington University in Saint Louis. In addition to his
sons, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and George
Harrison of The Beatles (who also studied under Ravi Shankar)
have been some of his famous students.
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