Ali Akbar Khan Celebrates a Lifetime of Musical Genius

80th birthday concert this Saturday

By Neela Banerjee
Special to AsianWeek

On the second floor of a large house in San Rafael, Calif., some 30 students pluck passionately at a variety of stringed instruments. Ranging from acoustic guitars to sitars to a single standing bass, their hands travel adeptly up and down the necks of each instrument, taking the key classical North Indian notes — sa re ga ma — into crescendo. At the front of the room, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan conducts, repeating the melody over and over into a microphone, tapping the tempo onto the sides of his harmonium.

“Listen carefully and then jump,” he admonishes his students. “If you just go, it is like someone who jumps in the water before knowing how to swim.”

Khan, a master of the 25-stringed sarode, may be the most significant Indian classical musician of modern times. The first to bring the rag to America, Khan founded the Ali Akbar College of Music in Marin in 1967, allowing him to pass on his legacy to over 10,000 students thus far.

In celebration of his life and times, Khan will perform for his 80th birthday on Saturday, Nov. 2 at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Accompanied by his 20-year old son Alam and tabla player Swapan Chaudhuri, the concert is another shining example of the timelessness of the music that Khan has helped spread throughout the world.

Everything in One Instrument

North Indian classical music has developed over 4000 years, based on ancient principles of rag and taal, or melody and rhythm. Khan’s family traces its musical and ancestral roots to Mian Tansen, a 16th century court musician of the Mogul Emperor Akbar. Khan’s father, Sri Baba Allauddin, has been acknowledged as the greatest figure in North Indian music of the 20th century. He played over 200 instruments and lived to be 110 years old.

Khan, who was born in 1922 in what is now Bangladesh, began his musical studies at the age of 3, learning a variety of string and percussion instruments. One day his father chose the sarode for him, “He said, ‘I’ll teach you to play everything in one instrument,’” Khan recalls. “He figured out how to fulfill all 200 in one.”

Khan gave his first performance at the age of 13. While still a teenager, Khan was supposed to accompany his father on a tour of Europe and America but didn’t want to go. “I didn’t want to leave my mother,” he says smiling. When his father learned that the young Khan was not practicing as much as he should be, he cancelled his tour early and came back to India to make sure his son was playing the 15 to 18 hours a day he was supposed to.

In 1955, at the age of 30, Khan came to America and performed an unprecedented concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also was broadcast across America on Allistair Cooke’s television show Omnibus. In just 10 years, classical Indian musicians would be playing at all the major music festivals and concerts, influencing an entire generation.

“When I came in ‘55, because I was in Indian dress, people on the street in New York came out of the bars and shops and followed us,” Khan remembers. “They asked me, ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’ When I said ‘India,’ some of them didn’t even know where it was.

“Or others who knew I was a musician asked funny questions like, “How can you play music in India with all the tigers and snakes and monkeys you have to fight off?’”

Khan came back and forth between India and the United States for several years, establishing the first Ali Akbar College of Music in Calcutta. Through the years, more and more Americans became interested in learning the music. Through temporary classes here and there, Khan established a group of some 100 students who wanted to study seriously.

“I didn’t know what to do. They wanted to come to India but I didn’t think I could sponsor them all for visas,” Khan said. So instead, he decided to move his school to California. At first the school was in Berkeley but Khan found the environment to be too urban and “noisy.” For some time, the school moved around, renting a space every few months. Locations included churches, schools, a Boy Scout camp and a Marine base. Eventually Khan purchased the house where the school is now established.

Going to Temple

After the class, one of four Khan teaches weekly, students — ranging in age and ethnicity from young men with long hair and beards to older Indian women in saris — line up to pay their respects to Khan. He greets them all personally, offering critiques and advice.

Over lunch at the IHOP across the street with some of his oldest students and his son, Khan expresses his dedication to the music and his desire to keep it spreading throughout the world.

“This music … is like a meditation, like going to temple. Music makes your heart very, very, very clear. You can feel what is peace, what is friendship, what is love, what you can do for others,” Khan says. “Even when you hear, it is like fresh air, clean water — even if you don’t understand it, when you hear it, it is pure.”

Over the years, Khan has received every major award in India, including Asian Paints Shiromani Award and the Padma Bhusan. In the United States, he received the Bill Graham Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area Music Awards foundation and numerous Grammy nominations.

In 1994, Khan founded the Ali Akbar Khan foundation to fund an archiving project for his own and his father’s works. His wife, sons and students are currently in the process of scanning and printing copies of over 100 of his father’s compositions as well as Khan’s own compositions, which number over 30,000. The archives have been named as one of the cultural treasures of the world.

Even though Khan has cut down the number of performances he does — at one time he performed five times a day — he is still going strong. He now dedicates much of his time to teaching his son, Alam. Just 20, Alam — a serious-faced young man who speaks in a Northern California accent tinged with Indian enunciations — studies music full-time and tours with his father.

Rajiv Taranath, 70, is Khan’s oldest student. He began studying with him in 1955, just after his return from the United States. Taranath, now based in Los Angeles, is one of the great Indian musicians living in the United States.

“I was his disciple there and continue to be his disciple,” Taranath says earnestly. “He is like my mother. Call him father, but he is like my mother. A father from time to time, will want to know what you have done with what he has given you, he calls for accounts. I gave you this, what did you do . . . In any rate, in India, a mother doesn’t do that. A mother just gives, and gives, and gives. Scolds. Maybe sometimes gets angry. But never call for accounts, just gives. From 1955 to this moment, just gives. Like my mother. What more can you want from a guru?”

Come celebrate Ali Akbar Khan’s 80th birthday at the Masters of the Classical Music of North India concert, featuring Ustad Ali Akbar Khan on the sarode, Sri Alam Khan on second sarode and Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri on the tabla, Saturday, Nov. 2 at 8 p.m. at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Tickets available at www.cityboxoffice.com. For information call 415-453-6264.