Ustad Shujaat Husain Khan

Shujaat Husain Khan was born in Calcutta on 19 May 1960, the son of the sitar player Ustad Vilayat Khan and Monisha Hazra. He began practising at three on a small sitar made for him, and gave his first concert at six, at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay. His training was with his father, in a family line that runs back through Ustad Enayat Khan and Ustad Imdad Khan.

He has performed across India and in Asia, Africa, North America and Europe, including at Carnegie Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, Royce Hall in Los Angeles and the Assembly Hall of the United Nations in Geneva, and was featured soloist with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra in 1999. With the Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor he formed the Indo-Persian group Ghazal, whose album The Rain was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album in 2004.

He has recorded over a hundred releases, among them the folk and Sufi album Lajo Lajo (1995) and a long series of collaborations with the Persian-language vocalist Katayoun Goudarzi. He has been visiting faculty at Dartington, the University of Washington in Seattle and UCLA.

He plays in the gayaki ang, the instrumental style modelled on the singing voice that his family developed, and he also sings during his recitals, moving between sitar and voice within a single performance. Alongside classical recitals he has worked in folk and Sufi repertoire and in sustained cross-tradition projects with Persian musicians.