
Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, who died in Marian County in California on June 19, was the musician who introduced subcontinental music, way back in 1955, to the US and that too at a time when many Americans, unlike their grandchildren today, had no idea where his country was located. He once mentioned, half in jest and half in earnest, that when he performed for the first time in the US at the invitation of the great violinist Yehudi Menon, who once referred to him as ‘an absolute genius…quite possibly the greatest musician in the world’, someone asked him how could he practise music in a country which was infested with tigers and snakes. Such was the ignorance about the maestro’s home country.
The prestigious venue was the auditorium of the New York’s Museum of Modern Art. That was shortly before he played on the sarod in Alistaire Cooke’s famous TV show Omnibus. Perhaps it was the first time that any genre of music from the subcontinent was performed in an American TV show. He was also the first Indian musician to cut a long play record in the US.
Born in 1922 in what is now Bangladesh, Ali Akbar Khan was the son and the pupil of Ustad Alauddin Khan, one of the most accomplished classical musicians of the subcontinent. The senior Khan, who died at the age of 105, also tutored his daughter Annapurna Devi, Pandit Ravi Shanker (who was to later marry and then jilt his benefactor’s daughter) and the late sitarist Nikhil Bannerjee.
Ali Akbar Khan performed riyaz for as many as 18 hours in a day, mostly with his father on the sarod, and sometimes on the percussion instruments with his uncle Faqir Aftabuddin. He gave his first public performance at 13 and eight years later became the state musician of the maharaja of Jodhpur.
Came independence and the abolition of princely states, Ali Akbar began to perform at concerts and for radio, occasionally for the recording companies in his home country, sharing the mantle of Maihar Gharana that he donned after his father’s death with Ravi Shankar, with whom he recorded what was perhaps the first jugalbandi (a friendly music contest) to appear on a disc. Giving them rhythmic support was the inimitable Ustad Allah Rakha, whose illustrious son Ustad Zakir Husain was to play the tabla for him many years later.
In the ’50s, he set up the Ali Akbar College of Music in Calcutta (now Kolkata) but when he shifted to the US, where he spent as many as nine months in a year, he started a music school by the same name initially in Berkeley and later shifted it to the scenic San Rafael, 10 miles from San Francisco.
I had the privilege of interviewing him in the institution where he trained so many musicians, mainly white Americans, not to speak of the children of the immigrants from South Asia. That was in 1994. Khan Sahib, as he was called by one and all in California, rued the fact that he was never invited to Pakistan. He also mentioned that in his younger years he was a great fan of Melody Queen Noor Jehan. Those were her younger days too, I told him, and he laughed heartily in agreement.
When he was reminded of his score for films, Chetan Anand’s Andhiyan, Merchant-Ivory’s Householder and Satyajit Ray’s Devi, he mentioned that people tend to forget what was considered a brilliant score for the great Bengali director Tapan Sinha’s movie Hungry Stone, which was based on a Rabindranath Tagore story. People don’t even seem to remember it now for none of his obituarists have so much as referred to it.
He changed the conversation to his school and the efforts that he and his colleagues like Swapan Choudhry, the tabla nawaz, have put in making the school a big success. Incidentally, a branch of the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music was opened in Basel, which was run by one of Khan Sahib’s accomplished pupil, Ken Zucherman. The Ustad went there once in a year. A few years later the college had to close down and Khan Sahib concentrated almost entirely on his school in San Rafael, where someone visiting from South Asia found an interesting sight, white Americans playing on the tabla, sitar and sarod among other instruments. One of them Jeff Whitier, a fine player of bamboo flute (not to be confused with the metallic flute of the West), is now a freelance teacher. Khan Sahib’s American wife, Mary, is a trained tabla player too.
Apart from music classical dance is also taught at the college and coincidentally it was during his days as the member of the faculty that Zakir Husain, the tabla wizard, met and later married a charming American-Italian girl who was learning kathak at the college.
Back to Khan Sahib, he made a casual mention of having been awarded in 1991 the highly prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, which made him richer by $375,000 (a fact one learnt only from the official brochure of his music college). He was nominated five times for the Grammy Award. He has also in all these years won several awards back home and in Bangladesh.
I met Khan Sahib again in 2005 and reminded him of the interview conducted eleven years earlier. He was polite and generous and he said he remembered it though one can be sure that someone who had been interviewed by countless mediapersons was not likely to recall any one single interview. Certainly not in the case of someone who was in his 80s.
Four years later, he died when he was 87, leaving behind a number of pupils and a good number of scintillating sarod recordings, not to speak of 10 children from three marriages. His eldest son, Dahanish Khan, a sarod nawaz, sadly died quite young – Asif Noorani
Source: DAWN.COM | Images