Ustad Vilayat Khan

Vilayat Khan was born on 28 August 1928 into the Imdadkhani, or Etawah, gharana — a line of sitar and surbahar players going back to his great-grandfather Ustad Sahebdad Khan. His father, Ustad Enayat Khan, was among the most celebrated sitarists of his generation and died when Vilayat was still a boy.

His training continued in the family: with his uncle Ustad Wahid Khan on surbahar, and with his mother's family on the vocal side, an influence that shaped everything he later did. He began recording in his early teens and was a leading concert artist by his twenties.

He performed for more than six decades in India and abroad, and also composed for film, including Satyajit Ray's Jalsaghar (1958) and Merchant Ivory's The Guru (1969).

He was a famously independent figure who declined Padma honours from the Government of India, saying the awards committees were not competent to judge music. He died in Mumbai on 13 March 2004. His sons Shujaat Khan and Hidayat Khan are sitarists.

Vilayat Khan's central contribution is the gayaki ang — a way of playing the sitar that follows the human voice. He reworked the instrument itself towards that end, favouring a lighter setup and a string arrangement that let him bend a note across several tones in a single pull, so that meend could carry the weight a singer's breath would.

The result is a sitar that phrases like khayal: sustained, ornamented, speech-like. Almost every sitarist after him has had to decide what to do with that inheritance.