The world of music and the music of the world have lost a giant today.
Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, the colussus of Hindustani instrumental music, died in San Francisco today at the age of 88. He had been in poor health for several months and his dialysis had failed a few days ago. "Khansaheb," as he was called, was not only a virtuoso performer on the Indian sarod, but a teacher of enormous impact who founded the longest-running school of Hindustani music in North America, the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California.
Khansaheb first came to the attention of American audiences in recordings produced by the violinist Yehudi Menuhin in the 1950s; he was the first Indian instrumentalist to receive wide notice in the West, followed closely by his then brother-in-law, Pandit Ravi Shankar.
More below the flip...
...The son and disciple of master instrumentalist Allaudin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan comes from a family that...
...traces its gharana (ancestral tradition) to Mian Tansen, a 16th century musical genius and court musician of Emperor Akbar. Ali Akbar Khan's father, the late Padma Vibhusan Acharya Dr. Allauddin Khan, was acknowledged as the greatest figure in North Indian music in this century.
Born in 1922 in East Bengal (Bangladesh), Ali Akbar Khan (Khansahib) began his studies in music at the age of three. He studied vocal music from his father and drums from his uncle, Fakir Aftabuddin. His father also trained him on several other instruments, but decided finally that he must concentrate on the sarode and on vocal. For over twenty years, he trained and practiced 18 hours a day. After that, his father continued to teach Khansahib until he was over 100 years old, and left behind such a wealth of material that the maestro feels he is still learning new things from it. Since his father's death in 1972, Khansahib has continued his father's tradition, that of the Sri Baba Allauddin Seni Gharana of Maihar and Rampur, India.
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As his surname indicates, Khansaheb was Muslim. The culture of music in which he was steeped, however, represents one of the great ecumenical traditions in the world. Hindus and Muslims learned freely from one another, sang each other's songs, performed together, acknowledged one another with profound respect. Ali Akbar Khan was no exception to this, and references to Hindu deities and legends were integral to his conversation, his teaching and his music.
As a teacher...
...Khansahib founded the Ali Akbar College of Music in Calcutta, India, in 1956. Later, recognizing the extraordinary interest and abilities of his Western students, he began teaching in America in 1965. In 1967, he founded the Ali Akbar College of Music in Berkeley, which moved to Marin County, California the following year.
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Ali Akbar Khan's influence on Western jazz and popular music was very significant. The LP records released in the 1960s and 1970s by Khan and Ravi Shankar (both as soloists and in duet) served to introduce countless musical seekers to a musical tradition of unparalleled profundity, richness and vitality. While Ravi Shankar's mentorship of George Harrison made an immediate impact through the Indian flavors that emerged in the Beatles' music, when music students actually sought a teacher, they overwhelmingly gathered in San Rafael, California to learn from Ali Akbar Khan.
In the last two decades of his life, Ali Akbar Khan received many awards:
Khan was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1989, among other awards. In 1997, Khan received the National Endowment for the Arts' prestigious National Heritage Fellowship, the United States' highest honour in the traditional arts. This followed a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1991. Khan has received five Grammy nominations.
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Here is a short video of Ali Akbar Khan as a younger man, at the peak of his instrumental powers:
Today the world of music has lost a man who served as a link to an all-but-vanished past; a man whose mission in life was consumed by music; a man who gave unceasingly to his thousands of students and who gave to them unstintingly; a man whose virtuosity and musicality set a standard to which musicians will aspire for generations to come.
Ali Akbar Khan, 1922-2009. Requiescat in pace.