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Swara Samrat – Ustad Ali Akbar Khan

Note: This article was compiled from several sources including The Hindu, The Times of India, The New York Times, and Wikipedia.

A Special Thank You Note: My many thanks to Aparna who helped clean and organize this aticle.

Ustad Ali Akbar Khan was born on April 14, 1922 in a family with a deep rooted pedigree in music. Like himself, his father Baba Allauddin Khan was a multi-instrumentalist.  Baba Saab is generally believed to be the founder of Maihar Gharana that is considered to be very similar to Hindustani classical music.  The sarodist Timir Baron, the flutist Pannalal Gosh, Pandit Ravi Shankar and Pandit Nikhil Banerjee, both prominent sitarists, were schooled in Maihar Gharana discipline.

Khan Saab was a virtuoso when it came to playing the sarod musical instrument.  He was a musician, a composer of several new classical ragas, he wrote music for a few films, he was a worldwide performer, and he was also an educator.  Khan Saab was bestowed with several honors during his brilliant career.  The Indian government named him a national treasure and honored him with Padma Vibhushan for his many achievements that enriched the field of classical music.

Khan Saab got his initial training in vocalization and playing various musical instruments from his father.  Under his father’s strict tutelage, Khan Saab used to practice several hours per day, sometimes as many as 18 hours in a given day.  The young Khan learned much from his father and eventually became a better instrumentalist than his father.  Even though Khan became an expert with many musical instruments, he concentrated on one in particular, the sarod.

Khan Saab perfected playing the sarod, a sonorous, steel-clad, 25 metal string instrument, of which ten are generally plucked with a coconut shell plectrum while the remaining 15 resonate sympathetically.  The instrument is of the lute family and Ustad created his musical compositions based partly on the ragas.  Mastery of the ragas gave him the ability to improvise his music based on many different scales.  He added his own brand of inflection and feeling by the permutations of these scales to come up with his own style of enduringly enjoyable music.

One particular technique Khan Saab developed was to bring out memorable melodies using only a few strokes of the sarod.  He is considered to be a musician’s musician for good reasons.  He was blessed with talent, imagination, experimental boldness, and yet an uncompromising traditionalist.  His playing style had backbone, as well as profound interpretative abilities upon his listeners. 

Kahn Saab’s compositions in essence were a distillation of traditional ragas.  Kahn had the mesmerizing command of Gat (also called, Bandish, which is the next part of Jod that are fixed compositions of a Raga) and Jhala (this is the climactic ending of the Raga where music becomes more playful and exciting).  He was renowned for long expansions of Raga in Alap (an exploration of the Raga) and Jod (follows Alap and brings the emotional mood of the Raga to the surface).

Khan Saab gave his first musical performance when he was only 13 years old.  This was in 1936, in Allahabad.  He gave his first recital on AIR when he turned 15.  Starting in 1940, when he was only 17 years, Khan Saab gave monthly recitals on AIR in Lucknow.  Later on he became the youngest director of that radio station.

Khan Saab was the court musician for the Maharaja in Jodhpur from 1943 to 1948.  In this court he started educating students in music and was bestowed with the title of Ustad by the Maharaja.  When the Maharaja passed away in an airline crash, Ustad decided to move to Bombay.

Encouraged by the results he got from educating aspiring musicians, Ustad  founded Ali Akbar College of Music in Calcutta in 1956.  Later, in 1967, he established another school in Berkeley, California, USA.  That school is now located in San Rafael, California.  In 1985, Ustad opened yet another branch in Basel, Switzerland.  He also taught music lessons at Montreal and McGill Universities in Canada.  When it came to instructing, though Khan Saab was a warm hearted generous man, he was a didactic teacher and stern disciplinarian.

Ustad was a maestro when it came to performing and a master teacher who trained countless students and turned many of them into maestros themselves.  These efforts ensured that the torch would be passed on to only the best, who could then carry forth the rich musical cultural heritage of India.  This type of renewal has kept our traditions alive for countless generations for their enjoyment.  "… Something that I find truly admirable in him is that he dedicated the last 40 years of his life teaching," Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma has stated in an interview.  He continued to add that "… teaching the sarod to a novice when you are a master can be excruciatingly boring. But Ustadji did this tough job for 40 years …"

After leaving the Maharaja’s court in 1948 and before dedicating himself to teaching, Khan Saab worked in the film industry.  He only worked on a few films, but was associated with names like Chetan Anand (“Aandhiyan”), Satyajit Ray (“Devi”), Ismael Merchant-James Ivory (“The Householder”), Tapan Sinha (“Kshudhita Pashan”), Bernardo Betrolucci (“Little Buddha”), and others.  He received the “Best Musician of the Year” award for Tapan Sinha’s “Kshudhita Pashan”, also called “Hungry Stones”.

Khan Saab started recording when he was just 22 years old.  During this phase he created several new ragas that received wider recognition and acclaim years later.  He was the first Indian to cut a Long Play record of Indian music in the West, entitled “Music of India: Morning and Evening Ragas”.  He was also the first Indian to perform on a television program, in Alistair Cooke’s “Omnibus”.

One of the ragas he composed and performed for a 78 record in 1945 was a three-minute piece called “Raga Chandranandan”.  This was a blend of four evening ragas, which became very popular.  It was a signature piece of Khan Saab in several of his concert performances.  This Raga was later re-recorded as a 22-minute performance.

Pandit Ravi Shankar was married to Ustad’s sister Annapurna Devi, Khan Saab’s sister, while he was a student of Khan Saab’s father.  This association resulted in the formation of their team.  Shankar and Ustad travelled the world performing together.  In these performances, jugalbandis between Shankar and Khan Saab became very popular.  Khan Saab also performed jugalbandis with many other popular musicians of his time including Vilayat Khan, L. Subramanyam, and many Western musicians.

Ustad came to the US at the invitation of the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin in 1955 to appear in a performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  Menuhin first met Khan Saab when he was on a visit to India in 1952 at a house recital in Delhi.  Menuhin was so impressed with Ustad’s skills and performance that Menuhin described Ustad as “an absolute genius” and “the greatest musician in the world.”  After the visit Ustad decided to stay in the US.  He lived in the US for the last 40 years of his life.  He passed away when he was 87, on Jun 18, 2009, because of poor health.

John Schaefer, the host of “Soundcheck” on WNYC-FM in New York has this to say about Ustad.  “… he had the ability to play a single note, or a simple passage of notes, and draw out such amazing depth. …”.  He adds, “… that’s why he was able to get a world of emotion and color out of “Malasri”, a three-note raga.  That stands as the calling card of the genius of Ali Khan. …”

Ustad performed twice at Madison Square Garden in New York City for the Concert of Bangladesh in which many well known musicians and singers participated.  Several notable musicians including Ravi Shankar, Nikhil Banerjee, Allah Rakha, Kamala Chakravarty, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and others also participated in the concert.  A movie and an album of the concert were later released.  Even though Khan Saab later admitted that he didn’t like the concert for personal reasons, it did help him to get an added exposure in the USA and in the West.

Khan Saab, known for his innovation, was never willing to compromise his music.  Based on the traditional ragas, a system of varying degrees of scales, he created his unusual melodies.  This unwillingness to make compromises made him endearing to music connoisseurs around the world.  His initial concerts mostly consisted of alaps but by the mid-60’s he became very bold and experimental.  He worked with several Western artists during this period, resulting in many noteworthy albums, such as, “Flowers of Evil: Six Poems of Baudelaire” in 1968 with Yvette Mimieux, and Indo-Jazz fusion albums with saxophonist John Handy, including, “Karuna Supreme” in 1975 and “Rainbow” in 1981.

Khan Saab performed hundreds of concerts to nearly 8 million people.  Like someone aptly observed, “to attend his recitals was to witness music as sacrament and time losing meaning”.  He recorded about 100 albums.  He was nominated five times for a Grammy Award, he was awarded the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award, and he received the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowments for the Arts.  Ustad was also named Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Music at University of California in Santa Cruz in 1999. He received the Asian Paints Shiromani Award, only the second Asian to receive such an award, the other was Satyajit Ray.  He performed at the request of the Indian government at the United Nations in New York and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC to commemorate India’s 50^th year as an independent nation.

Khan Saab received honorary doctorate degrees from various universities in India and abroad.  These include Viswa Bharati University, Rabindra Bharati University, University of Delhi, University of Decca, New England Conservatory of Music, and the California Institute of the Arts.

Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma, the noted maestro of santoor, has this to say in an interview talking about Khan Saab.   "… something that I find truly admirable in him is that he dedicated the last 40 years of his life teaching."  He continued to add that "… teaching the sarod to a novice when you are a master can be excruciatingly boring. But Ustadji did this tough job for 40 years …"

Perhaps the greatest tribute that was ever given to him was by none other than his father.  He told his son that he was so proud of him that he has no hesitation in saying these words.  “… I am so pleased with your work in music that I will do something which is very rare.  As your Guru and father, I am giving you a title, ‘Swara Samrat’, loosely translated to mean the king of music, …”.  

In the end, Khan Saab’s work touched upon several facets of Hindustani music.  He was a court musician, a radio broadcaster, a composer who worked with notable film personalities, and he also built a rich legacy of student with his instruction that will continue for years to come.  Khan Saab brought people all over the world a little closer together through his abundantly rich music in a time when the internet did not exist.  We are left with his legacy to listen and to treasure.  And, in fact, his legacy continues through his three sons, Aashish, Alam-E-Aftabuddin, and Manik.  All three are now considered to be expert sarodists.

The Swara Samrat once said that “ … music is the only thing that you can share with a million people and you don’t lose, you gain. …”  He once wrote of the sarod, "If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist -- then you may please even God."

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