Ali Akbar Khan, 87, a Bengali musician who was regarded as one of the finest artists of Indian classical music and who spread classical Indian music to the West on television, record and stage, died June 18 at his home in San Anselmo, Calif., of a kidney ailment. Khan was born April 14, 1922, in British-controlled East Bengal, now Bangladesh.
The son of a revered musician and teacher, Khan began intensive training as a child and partnered with sitar player Ravi Shankar performing duets throughout India.
Ali Akbar Khan was a virtuoso of the sarod, a 25-string instrument in the lute family. His chosen musical genre is based in part on the concept of the raga, which consists of improvised music based on a variety of scales. From these scales, or permutations of them, Indian musicians follow traditional forms but add their own inflections and feeling.
The late American violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who became one of his earliest champions in the West, said he considered Mr. Khan “an absolute genius, the greatest musician in the world.”
Khan was appointed court musician to the maharaja of Jodhpur in 1943, and his international career launched under Menuhin, who organized a showcase of Indian music at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 1955 and made the sarodist a principal performer.
As Indian culture and music began to infuse Western pop culture in the 1960s, widespread interest in musicians such as Khan grew. In 1967 he established the Ali Akbar College of Music in Berkeley, Calif., which he later moved to Marin County north of San Francisco.
In 1971, a civil war transformed Mr. Khan’s homeland, called East Pakistan at the time, into the independent country of Bangladesh. The war created an immense humanitarian crisis among the already poor population. Former Beatles guitarist George Harrison, a student and performer of Indian music, assembled a number of musicians for a relief benefit concert held at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
Ali Akbar Khan and Shankar performed at the Concert for Bangladesh with musicians such as Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr. An album and a movie of the concert were later released.
Related posts:
