Sarod master Ali Akbar Khan (1922-2009)

Times of India

Sarod maestro dies at 88
20 Jun 2009, 0447 hrs IST, Namita Devidayal, TNN


NEW DELHI: Ustad Ali Akbar Khan once said that music is the only thing that you can share with a million people and you don't lose, you gain. After sharing his music all over the world, the sarod maestro died in San Francisco on Friday morning, following a prolonged kidney ailment.

He was 88. He is survived by his wife Mary, 11 children, and an extraordinary musical legacy that includes the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California.

Ali Akbar Khan was born in 1922 in East Bengal (Bangladesh) and, like so many children born into musical families, learned how to play various instruments before he could spell. His father, Baba Allauddin Khan, was one of the great names of Hindustani music. "For us, as a family, music is like food. When you need it you don't have to explain why, because it is basic to life," Ali Akbar Khan had said.

In his early twenties, he made his first recording in Lucknow for HMV. He then became the court musician for the Maharaja of Jodhpur where he worked for seven years.

In 1955, on the request of violin master Yehudi Menuhin, Ali Akbar Khan first visited the US and performed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. By the sixties, the West was clamouring for more and he pushed India on the world music map, with a little help from his friend Pandit Ravi Shankar (who was earlier married to Khansahib's sister, Annapurna Devi).

Responding to a wave of interest in the West, he began teaching and living in the US and, in 1967, founded the Ali Akbar College of Music in California, where he had been teaching since, along with tabla stalwart Ustad Zakir Hussain. Khansahib also opened a branch of his college in Basel, Switzerland, run by his disciple Ken Zuckerman, where he taught when on his world tours. Speaking from London, Ustad Zakir Hussain said, "He was one of the greatest musicians ever, a musician's musician.