Ustad Sabri Khan

Sabri Khan was born on 21 May 1927 in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, into a family of musicians on both sides. He was started on the sarangi by his grandfather Ustad Haji Mohammed Khan and continued with his father Ustad Chajju Khan, both sarangi players; he also took rare technical material from his uncle Ustad Laddan Khan of Rampur.

His son Kamal Sabri has said he began playing for All India Radio at twelve and gave the broadcaster some fifty years, working as a staff artiste and accompanying vocalists. The Times of India reports that he played the Vande Mataram broadcast from Parliament a minute after midnight as India became independent in 1947, was part of All India Radio's first orchestra, and was brought to Jawaharlal Nehru's sickbed to play for him. As an accompanist he played for most of the leading vocalists of his time, among them Ustad Amir Khan, Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Begum Akhtar and Pandit Omkarnath Thakur, and he was equally at home in khayal, thumri and ghazal.

In the early 1960s he travelled to the United States with Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Alla Rakha, and he is generally credited with introducing the sarangi to concert audiences in Europe and North America. He played a duet with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and in 1981 was a visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.

He was a prolific teacher; Kamal Sabri estimates around three hundred students between Indian and Western universities. His sons Kamal Sabri, Sarwar Sabri and Gulfam Sabri became musicians, as did grandsons including the sarangi players Suhail Yusuf Khan and Nabeel Khan. Writing after his death, The Hindu emphasised that he was as notable for the number of players he trained as for his own performing career. He died in New Delhi on 1 December 2015, aged eighty-eight.

Sources disagree about his gharana, and the disagreement is partly one of naming. Wikipedia and SangeetCentral place him in the Senia lineage that traces itself to Mian Tansen; an interview published on raga.hu describes him as a representative of the Moradabad gharana of sarangi playing; the Times of India obituary combines the two and calls it the "Sainia Moradabad" gharana. We keep all three accounts visible rather than choosing between them.

He belonged to the generation that pulled the sarangi out of a long period of low status, when it was treated as an instrument of the courtesan salons, and he was among its early solo recitalists. He himself talked about the sarangi as capable of the whole range from dhrupad and khayal through thumri and tappa to folk song and ghazal - a reading he tied to the folk etymology sau rangi, "a hundred colours", which his son Kamal Sabri recalls him using.