Ali Akbar College of Music

The Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael is a teaching institution, not a gharana, and the name belongs to three related schools rather than one: Calcutta, founded in 1956; California, founded in 1967; and Basel, founded in 1985. This page is about the Californian school. It teaches the tradition its founder inherited from his father, which the college names the Seni Baba Allauddin gharana, and the California Arts Council has described it as the only institution outside India teaching that tradition in the traditional manner.

The college specialises in sarode, sitar and tabla at a professional level, and its instructors also teach violin and vocal music; students may learn on an instrument of their own choosing, Indian or not. Teaching runs in seasonal group classes in San Rafael and online, alongside a scholarship programme, a concert series, school demonstrations and the Ali Akbar Khan Library.

Ali Akbar Khan's son Ustad Alam Khan and senior disciples of Khansahib teach the instrumental and vocal classes, and Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri teaches intermediate and advanced tabla; that faculty description is drawn from the college's own pages and a California Arts Council grantee record. The college also runs The Works, a free periodic gathering at which musicians of any style read and play Ali Akbar Khan's compositions from sargam notation; as of its last published notice no dates were scheduled.

The San Rafael building holds practice rooms, classrooms and a concert hall. There are no residential facilities. Free to anyone who walks in is the Ali Akbar Khan Library, built over twenty years by Khansahib and his wife Mary Khan, who directs the college and manages the library: more than eight thousand hours of his classes, concerts, audio and video, with 361 ragas taught by him held in the physical collection and a selection published online.

Ali Akbar Khan founded the first Ali Akbar College of Music in Calcutta in 1956. He founded a second in Berkeley, California, in 1967, and it moved the following year to Marin County and then to San Rafael, where it has remained. A third opened in Basel, Switzerland, in 1985 under his disciple Ken Zuckerman. The college traces its teaching mission to Khansahib's father, Acharya Baba Allauddin Khan, who held that the music should be taught to anyone who wished to learn it.

In 2003 a selection from the college's sound archive — including live performances by Allauddin Khan, Kishan Maharaj, Nikhil Banerjee and Alla Rakha — was among the fifty recordings added that year to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. The college publishes a class schedule for 2026, so it is operating; this description was last checked in September 2026.

The college calls its tradition the Seni Baba Allauddin gharana of Maihar and Rampur, and its own lineage page explains the second half of that name. Ali Akbar Khan described his father leaving home at eight, studying singing in Calcutta for seven years, then violin and Western instruments, before finding the sarod player Ahmed Ali Khan in Rampur. After three years his teacher sent him on to Mohammed Wazir Khan, court musician at Rampur and a descendant of Mian Tansen's line, whose gate he was refused at for about two years before a letter to the king finally admitted him.