Ustad Asad Ali Khan

Asad Ali Khan was born at Alwar in Rajasthan on 1 December 1937, into a family that had supplied veena players to the courts of Jaipur, Alwar and Rampur. His training was with his father, Ustad Sadiq Ali Khan, and ran for about fifteen years and covered voice as well as the veena; Darbar's account gives the starting age as six.

For most of his working life he was one of very few musicians performing publicly on the rudra veena, and published accounts describe him as the last surviving master of the khandar bani. He worked with All India Radio, taught at the Bharatiya Kala Kendra in New Delhi from the 1960s to the 1980s, and taught for seventeen years in the Faculty of Music and Fine Arts at the University of Delhi. His obituarist and student Carsten Wicke records that for lack of veena students his institutional classes were mostly in music theory and in sitar played in veena style, and that his private rudra veena students were almost exclusively foreigners - a situation Khan spoke about publicly, saying he feared his Western students would one day have to return the tradition to India.

He performed in Australia, the United States, Afghanistan, Italy and other European countries, taught courses in the United States, and played regularly for SPIC MACAY, which takes classical music into Indian schools and colleges. He died on 14 June 2011 at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi.

Wicke describes a playing style in which strict formal grammar was combined with devotional expression: exact and unhurried in the design of a raga, yet directed throughout at bhakti rasa. Khan preferred a small group of ragas whose character suited the veena - darbari, lalit, todi, multani, marwa, shri, puriya and chandrakauns among them, with lyrical readings of yaman, bihag, bageshri and khamaj - and his recitals typically built towards a jor-jhala that held the stillness of a single note against rhythmic momentum. He was a practising Shia Muslim who spoke of the veena as an instrument of Shiva and saw no difficulty in expressing his own devotion through dhrupad.