Ustad Ali Akbar Khan

Ali Akbar Khan was born on 14 April 1922, the son of Ustad Allauddin Khan, the Maihar teacher whose students included Ravi Shankar and Annapurna Devi. His training under his father began in early childhood and was legendarily demanding — many hours a day, for years.

He served as court musician to the Maharaja of Jodhpur, recorded extensively, and composed for film, including Satyajit Ray's Devi and Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha.

In 1955, at Yehudi Menuhin's invitation, he performed in New York and made what is often described as the first Western LP of Indian classical music, and appeared on American television. He settled in California and in 1967 founded the Ali Akbar College of Music in Marin County, teaching there for more than forty years.

He died at San Anselmo, California, on 18 June 2009.

The Ali Akbar College of Music's own account of his life fills in the training: his mother was Madina Begum, and after his earliest lessons he was sent to Bengal to study with his uncle Fakir Aftabuddin Khan, who taught him percussion and flute. His father settled him on the sarod at around nine or ten, and the practice that followed — by Khan's own recollection, up to eighteen hours a day for twenty years — also included learning how to teach and how to compose.

In the United States his work was recognised with a MacArthur Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship.

Khan's sarod is remembered for its weight and its interiority: a dark, sustained tone, a slow alap that seems to take its time out of ordinary time, and a command of raga structure inherited directly from Allauddin Khan's Maihar teaching.

His duets with Ravi Shankar defined the jugalbandi for a generation. His other great contribution is pedagogical — the Ali Akbar College trained several generations of players outside India, and did it without diluting the method he had been taught.