Ustad Aashish Khan

Aashish Khan was born on 5 December 1939 at Maihar, where his grandfather Ustad Allauddin Khan was court musician. He was initiated into Hindustani music at the age of five by Allauddin Khan, and later trained with his father, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, and his aunt, Annapurna Devi. His mother, Zubeida Begum, was Ali Akbar Khan's first wife.

He grew up between Maihar and Calcutta, and gave his first public performance at thirteen on All India Radio's National Program in New Delhi; in the same year he appeared with his father and grandfather at the Tansen Music Conference in Calcutta. In 1969 he co-founded the Indo-American group Shanti with the tabla player Zakir Hussain, and later the fusion group The Third Eye. Under Ravi Shankar he played on film and stage soundtracks. With his brother Pranesh Khan he composed the 1982 album Disco Jazz, sung by Rupa Biswas. From 1989 to 1990 he was composer and conductor for the National Orchestra of All India Radio in New Delhi.

He taught for much of his life: as adjunct professor of Indian classical music at the California Institute of the Arts and at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and on the faculties of the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, the University of Alberta and the University of Washington. He divided his later years between Kolkata, where he founded the Aashish Khan School of World Music, and California. He was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2006 in the Best Traditional World Music Album category for Golden Strings of the Sarode, and received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award. He died in Los Angeles on 14 November 2024, aged eighty-four.

He plays the sarod of the Senia Maihar school received from Allauddin Khan and Ali Akbar Khan. In Shanti he was heard playing the acoustic sarod through a guitar amplifier with a vibrato effect, an early instance of the instrument being placed in a rock ensemble.