Khan, Ali Akbar

(b Shivpur, East Bengal [now Bangladesh], 14 April 1922). Indian sarod player. The global expansion of the classical music of North India in the late 20th century is associated with two pioneering artists: the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan and his brother-in-law, the sitār player Ravi Shankar. While neither was the first Indian artist to tour the West, their touring and teaching was of premier importance in popularizing Hindustani classical music among Western musicians.

Ali Akbar Khan is the son of Allauddin Khan, who was widely respected for his fusion of many separate regional styles into a modern concert style which influenced many instrumentalists and established instrumental music on a par with long-respected vocal traditions. Allauddin Khan taught this style to several musicians including his son Ali Akbar, Ravi Shankar, the flautist Pannalal Ghosh and the sitār player Nikhil Banerjee.

When Ali Akbar was born, his father was court musician to the Maharaja of Madhya Pradesh. The family home, the Madina Bhavan, was an ashram for music. Ali Akbar was taught the traditional literature of rāga and tāla in Hindustani style and was expected to practise for several hours every day. During his teens he studied side by side with Ravi Shankar, and when they emerged as young artists in the 1940s, they astounded their audiences with the brilliance of their technique as well as the depth of their knowledge. After a short period as a music director of All-India Radio in Lucknow, Ali Akbar became court musician to the Maharaja of Jodhpur. Following the dissolution of the court system, Ali Akbar moved to Bombay and was music director for several films, winning awards for the scores of The Hungry Stones and Devi.

The development of his classical concert career was assisted by his recording of the rāga Chandranandan, which he composed in the recording studio, ‘and then I had to get the recording to learn how the rāga went’, as he describes the creation of one of his signature rāgas. He decided to concentrate on the classical music of his training, and in 1955 he founded the Ali Akbar College of Music in Calcutta to pass on the teachings of his father. Later that year Yehudi Menuhin invited him to come to the United States to record and appear on television. The recording was the first long-playing recording of Indian classical music and convinced Ali Akbar that there was interest in the West for Hindustani classical music. After several tours, he began to teach near San Francisco in 1965. Word of his teaching spread rapidly after the beginning of the Beatles’ association with the music of Ravi Shankar, and in 1968 he founded the Ali Akbar College of Music in Berkeley (later in San Rafael). He taught a new generation of musicians including his sons Ashish, Alam and the late Dhyanesh Khan and the Western students George Ruckert, Ken Zuckerman, James Pomerantz, Bruce Hamm, Daisy Paradis, Peter van Gelder and Richard Harrington; the sarod player Zuckerman has opened a branch of the Ali Akbar College in Basle.

Ali Akbar Khan was awarded many titles and honours including the Padma Bhushan, which he received in 1988. Other awards included the McArthur Fellowship, the Shiromani Hall of Fame Award and a fellowship from the NEA. He received honorary doctoral degrees from Rabindra Bharati University and the California Institute of the Arts. During the 1990s he continued to record, perform and teach from his base at the Ali Akbar College in California.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and other resources

R. Shankar: My Music, my Life (New York, 1968)

W. van der Meer: Hindustani Music in the 20th Century (The Hague, 1980)

A.A. Khan and G. Ruckert: Introduction to the Music of North India (St Louis, 1991)

A.J. Miner: Hindustani Instrumental Music in the Early Modern Period (New Delhi, 1996)

RECORDINGS

GEORGE RUCKERT