Bade Ghulam Ali Khan

Bade Ghulam Ali Khan was born on 2 April 1902 in the Kasur district of Punjab, in what was then British India. He trained under his father, Ali Baksh Khan, and his uncle, Kale Khan, and began his career singing their compositions. Mubarak Ali Khan and Barkat Ali Khan were his younger brothers.

His notable early performances included Calcutta in 1938 and the All India Music Conference in Bombay in 1944. After the Partition of India in 1947 he moved to Kasur, by then in Pakistan, returning to live in India permanently in 1957; he acquired Indian citizenship and settled at Malabar Hill in Bombay. He lived at various times in Lahore, Bombay, Calcutta and finally Hyderabad.

He largely kept away from film work, but was persuaded by the producer K. Asif to sing two pieces, in ragas Sohni and Rageshri, for Mughal-e-Azam (1960) with music by Naushad — the only film playback of his career.

A near-paralysing stroke in 1961 left him partially disabled, and from then he performed with the support of his younger son, Munawar Ali Khan. He died at Basheer Bagh Palace in Hyderabad on 23 April 1968 and is buried at the Daira Mir Momin cemetery there.

His style drew three traditions together into what became the Kasur-Patiala manner: the Behram Khani elements of dhrupad, the gyrations of Jaipur and the behlavas, or embellishments, of Gwalior. Many of his raga expositions were deliberately brief. He accepted that the beauty of classical music lay in unhurried improvisation, but judged that his audiences would not sit through long alaps, and he sang for the many rather than the few; he was particularly at home in lighter ragas such as Adana, Bhupali, Hameer, Jaijaiwanti and Jaunpuri. Under the pen name Sabrang he composed a large number of new bandishes. Ashok Ranade, hearing him open a Bombay concert with Kedara in 1948, described a voice of wide range and easy movement in all tempi whose defining quality was lucidity — the Sanskrit prasad, the power to convey meaning without obstruction: his enunciation was unhurried and exact, vowels and joint consonants kept undistorted even at high pitch, and the words never rounded off at the edges, a control that carried even into his tarana singing. He recorded for His Master's Voice and was active from about 1923 to 1967. India Post issued a stamp in his honour in 2003.

He drew together the Behram Khani elements of dhrupad, the melodic gyrations of Jaipur and the behlavas of Gwalior into his own Kasur Patiala style. Many of his raga expositions were deliberately brief: he held that the beauty of classical music lay in unhurried improvisation, but judged that his audiences would not sit through long alaps. He excelled in lighter ragas such as Adana, Bhupali, Hameer, Jaijaiwanti and Jaunpuri, and composed under the pen-name "Sabrang". He was equally celebrated in thumri, dadra and bhajan.