ALI AKBAR KHAN
An Appreciation
Om
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Looking into the eyes of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan is like looking into the
Earth's deepest ocean. Khansahib, a title by which he is known to his
students, gives forth musical knowledge from a being so saturated in
melody, so steeped in rhythm and a deep, profound knowledge of hundreds of
ragas -- that there is never any question of more. There is always more
for each individual student and for all students, all listeners, everyone
who is thirsty for the delights of North Indian classical music.
For us, as a family, music is like food.
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Ali Akbar Khan, heir to the Seni Baba Allauddin Gharana and destined to
become one of the greatest musical geniuses the world has ever known, was
born in Shivpur, Bangladesh in 1922. That same year, his family moved to
Maihar, in northern India, a rural, flat land, where the highest hill was
that on which the Sharda Ma Temple stood, and living was still tuned to
the rhythms of the earth. In ancient times the Khan family was Hindu, but
three or four generations ago they converted to Islam. Today, Khansahib.
whose religion is music, might be described as a Westernized-Muslim-Hindu,
of a Sufi, a distillation of many traditions, the quintessential world
citizen. His music speaks to the soul wherever that soul may reside -- in
India, China, Russia, Africa, Australia, Europe or the Americas, the Far
East, the Near East, the Middle East, or the West.
1995 marks forty years since Ali Akbar Khan first left India to visit
other countries of the world, and to come to America. Though he is now
seventy-three, given the good luck and good genes of his father, who lived
to be one hundred and ten, his devotees can look forward to another
thirty, perhaps, forty years. For, whether or not he teaches from the dais
in the concert hall of the Ali Akbar College of Music, which he founded
twenty-six years ago, he will teach. To sit in Khansahib's presence is to
learn.
First you build the house -- you make
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Thus Khansahib describes the structure of, and the process of learning the
structure of a raga. At times he states this metaphor simply, at other
times, chuckling all the while, he adds graphic embellishments.
Derived from the fusion of cultures that swept over North India and
adapted now to the ways of the Western World, Khansahib's music both
transmits and creates the sound of what we in the West have come to know
as North Indian classical music.
Ali Akbar Khan grew up in Maihar, in Madhya Pradesh, where his father, the
legendary Baba Allauddin Khan (in his youth known as Alam) was court
musician to the Maharaja. Ali Akbar's musical instruction began at the age
of three. He practiced on many different instruments. (Baba Allauddin
played over 200 instruments, both Eastern and Western.) However, when Ali
Akbar was nine, Baba singled out the sarode for his only son--and the ever
continuing study of vocal music.
For twenty years, the young Khan was set to practice eighteen hours nearly
every day by this temperamental and severe taskmaster who lived simply and
dressed as plainly as a saint.
I don't like music until I am fifty. Then
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Stories abound of Ali Akbar's fear of Baba Allauddin, of the severity of Baba's discipline.
...during my childhood, up to age sixteen or
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His father was also a deeply compassionate man. He took in orphans from
the plagues that periodically swept India, and trained them as musicians.
When Ali Akbar was in his early teens his father made him director -- over
these now grown children -- and composer for the Maihar Band which became
famous throughout India.
When my father was a student, nobody wanted
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In addition to the orphan musicians, many students came each year to study
with Baba Allauddin. Some were frightened away by his strictness and his
temper. Of the others who stayed, some became the great musicians of the
age, Nikhil Banerjee, Sharan Rani, Indranil Battacharya, Pannalal Ghosh.
In 1938, the eighteen year old Ravi Shankar came to study the sitar.
During the seven years he stayed at Maihar, he studied, at times, alone
with Baba and, at times, in company with Ali Akbar and Baba's daughter,
Annapurna. In 1940 he married Annapurna and became Ali Akbar Khan's
brother-in-law.
In the mid '40s, these two young musicians, Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi
Shankar, who were destined to become the most notable international North
Indian Classical musicians of the age, began to perform in Bombay, Delhi,
Calcutta, in concerts and at conferences and festivals throughout India.
Annapurna, though as talented as her brother and husband, but born in an
era when few women became concert musicians shied away from public
performance.
While still in his twenties, Ali Akbar Khan became Music Director for All
India Radio in Lucknow. Then he was sent to Jodhpur as a substitute for
his father who had been invited to become court musician for the Maharaja
of Jodhpur. He remained there for six years, playing music up to eight
hours a day. Upon the untimely death of the Maharaja, and having become
fascinated with the film world, Ali Akbar moved to Bombay, the movie
capitol of India, where, to his father's distress, he composed film
music.
When my father heard that I was working
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For Ali Akbar had found the, for the most part, popularizing nature of
film music unrewarding. He resumed touring within India, playing at
festivals and concerts and in Delhi, in 1954, he met one of the twentieth
century's greatest Western musicians, Yehudi Menuhin -- who had become
fascinated with Indian music.
I would say without hesitation that the
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Having become acquainted with the young musicians, Menuhin wanted to introduce them to Western audiences.
I don't want to come to America. I don't want
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In 1955, Ali Akbar Khan, at thirty-three, flew to Europe. Both he and
Ravi Shankar, invited by Yehudi Menuhin and sponsored by the Ford
Foundation, were to tour England and come to the United States to play
several concerts. Shankar could not come. Flying with Chatur Lal, who
would play tabla, and Shirish Gor, who would play tanpura, Ali Akbar Khan
came to America.
...my friends pushed me more or less
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In New York City the young men from India stayed in a hotel near the
Museum of Modern Art.
People are very nice when we walk in the
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Before the concert there was a party:
It was April, there was my birthday,
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The first concert, at the Museum of Modern Art, was given to an audience,
not too large, partly invited, partly public and, by Indian standards, it
was short, about two hours. The whole music world was there -- the
luminaries had gathered to greet a visiting star from the other side of
the sphere. Afterward, Rockefeller gave a party in his...
...not guest house, Rockefeller, some kind of
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Two other concerts followed, one at Rockefeller Center in New York and one
in Washington D.C.. Thus -- using only one knight, an instrumentalist who,
at that age, looked like a cherub and played a beautiful, but
unknown-to-the-West, instrument called a sarode, and one drummer, playing
a tabla (a drum), also, at that time, unknown in the West, and one
musician playing the tanpura, a drone which creates the environment within
which Indian music takes place -- Saraswati, Goddess of Music began her
conquest of the West.
Probably no one could have foretold that night that Ali Akbar Khan would
eventually come to live in America and teach whole generations to
appreciate and to play what is known to this day in India as Nada Brahma,
the Language of God.The haunting purity of the single notes of the alap,
the varying of them little by little, the coaxing of them into clusters of
soaring melody, the rhythmic complexity of the jor, the jhala, the gat --
the sheer ecstasy of the performance enthralled his new audiences. In the
same year as he gave his first three American concerts, Khansahib appeared
on Allistar Cooke's Omnibus, the first Indian musician ever to play on
Western television.
In addition to the concerts and TV appearance, in 1955 Khansahib recorded,
in New York City, the first ever long playing record of North Indian
classical music. For even in India, no company wanted to chance cutting a
record of classical music on such new technology. But when Khansahib's
recorded-in-the-West album of Rag Sindhu Bhairavi and Rag Pilu Baroowa --
both introduced by Yehudi Menuhin announcing the scale, counting the
sixteen beats of Tintal, and demonstrating the drone -- was released on
Angel records, as surely as the unleashing of a nuclear chain reaction, it
began to change the course of music around the world.
Khan returned to India in 1956 to found the Ali Akbar College of Music in
Calcutta. The world was changing, not only in the radical ways that
followed India's Independence, but the rest of the world, too, was taking
a quantum leap in awareness. During the late '50s, '60s and early '70s
Western flower children set out to explore every corner of the earth.
Crowds of young people went to India, and in their best moments tried to
absorb some of its four thousand year old culture. This new generation was
beginning to realize that many cultures were older, more complex, and
often more beautiful than their own which was so single-mindedly dedicated
to comfort and materialism. Slowly, the West was beginning to acknowledge
the awesome extent of the destruction of the earth's cultural heritage
that the era of colonialism had left in its wake. The flower children,
for all their excesses, left a a legacy of love for much that the West, in
succeeding decades, has began to admire, to listen to, and to understand.
Among these treasures was North Indian classical music, one of the most
ancient and complex musical systems ever invented.
The Indian musician creates in public and does
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During the years that followed, Ali Akbar Khan came many times to Europe
and America to play and to teach. In 1965 and 1966 he came at the
invitation of the The American Society of Eastern Art in Berkeley. In
1967, a little over a decade after his first visit to America, Khansahib
decided that California was a place where he could dedicate himself to
teaching the Western students that, by then, surrounded him. That year he
founded the Ali Akbar College of Music in Berkeley, California.
This country is 200 years only, India is
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From 1967 to 1977, the school moved its temporary quarters twenty-two
times as Khansahib began to spend, at first, a few months a year, then
longer and longer periods in the United States.
If you want to teach then you have to give
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The school expanded. It brought many of the greatest musicians from India
to teach, as full time faculty and/or as guest artists, these included
Ravi Shankar, V.G. Jog, Villayat Khan, Nikhil Banerjee, Lalita Ghosh,
G.S.Sachdev, Aashish Khan, Dhyanesh Khan, Chitresh Das, Bahadur Khan,
Indranil Battacharya, Laxmi Shankar, Pandit Jasraj, Satyadev Pawar,
Shankar Ghosh, Sanjukta Ghosh, Mahaparush Misra, Jnan Prakash Ghosh, Alla
Rakha, Zakir Hussain, and Swapan Chaudhuri.
Khansahib's first "permanent" home here was at 215 First Street In San
Rafael. Why has this address stuck in his mind when many other dates and
facts have gone into time? "Because it is the number of my college." he
says, "which for eighteen years now has had its permanent home at 215 West
End Avneue."
When asked if he decided to settle in Marin County because Mt. Tamalpais
looked like the mountain in Maiher on which the Sharda Ma Temple sits, he
said:
I liked San Rafael, that's all, it's very
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Khansahib Is full of paradoxes, for though he has lived mainly in the
United States for over twenty years, he is not a Westerner, but he feels
he is no longer at home in India either, "...too many people die, too much
change." Khansahib comes to his seventies, not without pain, and not
without sacrifice. He takes the vicissitudes and delights of his life and
turns them into Sadja, Rishaba, Gandhara, Madhyama, Panchama, Dhaivata,
Nishada -- the notes of the Indian music scale, derived from, as legend
has it, the cries of the peacock, the chataka bird, the goat, the heron,
the cuckoo in the spring, the frogs during rain, and the elephant's
trumpeting. Khansahib, like the music, is grounded in the earth.
In India he had two famlies. The sons of the second family, Aashish,
Pranesh and Dhyanesh, have graced their father's college with their
musical and teaching skills. Aashish is a sarodist, Pranesh, a tabla
player and Administrative Director of the AACM, and Dhyanesh, until his
early death in 1991, was an outstanding teacher and sarode player.
Khansahib's daughter, Amina Perera, who remained in Calcutta, is a fine
sitarist and excellent teacher.
Khansahib cherishes the peace and quiet that living in Marin County offers
him, where close friends and musicians from all over the world come to
visit, to learn, to listen, to play and to teach at the College. He has a
new family here, an American wife, Mary Johnson Khan -- who having studied
tabla with Swapan Chaudhuri, Zakir Hussain and Alla Rakha, still, at
times, plays theka for her husband's classes -- and three young children.
The eldest child is named Alam after his grandfather. He and his brother
Manik began this year to study sarode and drum, respectively, at the AACM.
The youngest, three and a half year old Madina, also picked out her drums
and was seen for a day carrying her brightly colored tabla rings and
covers about the school.
Mary Khan oversees the Alamedina Record Company, that is the primer
producer of Ali Akbar Khan's prodigious output. In cooperation with
Khansahib she recently founded the Ali Akbar Khan Foundation to archive
the music of the Baba Allauddin Gharana. One of its main projects over the
next few years will be to release a series of CDs which will present and
preserve many compositions that are for now archived only in Khansahib's
memory. There are thousands of such compositions taught to him by his
father, other thousands that he has composed during the more than half
century of his musical Haj. This year he began this work of direct
transmission by inviting Asha Bhosle to learn and record a group of rare
songs handed down through the Baba Allauddin Gharana, as learned by Baba
Allauddin from Wazir Khan, a direct descendant of Mian Tansen's daughter
Saraswati; as well as some tarana's from Bhadurhussain Khan, creator of
the tarana form.
Khansahib's international touring, giving dozens of performances each
year, continues with unabated energy. Even though it is exhausting to
spend one's life in airports, on planes, in hotels, in cars, going to
unknown concert halls, in, for the most part, unseen cities, he continues
to play and to teach in almost every country of the world. He has opened a
branch of the AACM in Basel, Switzerland to serve Europe, and a branch in
Fremont, California to served the Bay Area's ever increasing Indian
population.
Many Indians, having heard from childhood the lyrical and mathematical
magic that is North Indian classical music, work in the computer industry
in the Bay Area and study music at the Ali Akbar Colleges at night. This
continues an ancient tradition. For the study of classical Indian music is
not primarily for training future concert performers, its intricacies are
mastered and its techniques perfected essentially for the student's own
pleasure and development.
I play for myself. If I like my music, you
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When Khansahib picks up his sarode -- carved from teak by his uncle, Ustad
Ayet Ali Khan, in 1933 -- and the muse of the raga comes to sit with him,
one can all but see, shimmering in air, the individual notes as they begin
to sing with an almost vocal beauty about the compassion, greatness,
sorrow, and sweetness that resides in every human heart.
If you practice for ten years, you may begin
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Swami Haridas, Tansen's guru, retreated to the forest and would not come
to sing even for Emperor Akbar. To hear the rapturous beauty of his voice,
the Emperor had to disguise himself and go into the forest. "I sing for
men," the great Tansen explained to the Emperor, "but Swamiji sings only
for God."
Many fortunate musicians who attend the AACM, re-experience this in a
modern way. For though, Khansahib's concerts are stellar events and, for
their dazzling beauty, are not to be missed. Still, it is in class when he
is creating a composition -- one more among the 500 he would like to teach
to his students in each raga -- that some of the greatest moments in music
happen. Suddenly it will seem as if Khansahib is alone -- or, some might
say, sitting within Goddess Saraswati's aura -- and from his sarode will
issue notes of such beauty that more than one student has found tears
running down his cheeks.
Khansahib walks in the footsteps of Tansen who, legend says, when
challenged by enemies to do so -- lit the lamps by singing Raga Dipak, but
died from the effort it cost. Among those who love him, none suggests
that Khansahib test his powers with Dipak. For in a sense his students
are his lamps. They have been lighted, they are his gift. They have cost
Khansahib's life, but it is a gift freely given. The rasa of art is to
give delight. Khansahib's presence has been an unending cornucopia of
delight to the musicians and music lovers of this world.
Honors have been lavished upon Ali Akbar Khan both by his native country
and countries around the world. To cite only a few, Khansahib has been
presented with the President of India Award twice, and holds the titles of
Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan. In the United States, he was invited to
play at the inaugural ceremonies of President Kennedy and, in 1991, he
received the MacArthur Foundation Genuis Fellowship in recognition of his
work in transmitting and enhancing the musical tradition of North India.
In 1993 he received the Bill Graham Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1994
the Ali Akbar Foundation was created to archive and preserve the music of
the Seni Baba Allauddin Gharana so that future
generations may hear and study it.
In 1995, as we celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Khansahib's first
arrival in America, we can only say "Welcome home, Khansahib, citizen of
the world, we are pleased that you have chosen to live among us."
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jjhaag@gmail.com
Jan Haag, writer, poet, painter and textile artist, creates works which incorporate the beauty and complexity of North Indian Classical music patterns into the intricacy of Textile Art. A retrospective of Haag's Needlepoints was shown at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Seattle, Washington.