Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar

Zia Mohiuddin Dagar was born in Udaipur on 14 March 1929 and began studying with his father, Ustad Ziauddin Khan Dagar, court musician to the Maharana of Udaipur. He was trained in both voice and rudra veena — an instrument singers then used privately to work out melody rather than to perform on. He took it as his main instrument anyway and gave his first recital at sixteen.

His father discouraged him from altering the instrument, but after his father's death he rebuilt it with the instrument makers Kanailal & Brother, enlarging the gourds (tumba) and the hollow neck (dandi) to deepen the resonance and lengthen the sustain, so that the veena could reproduce the long held phrases of dhrupad singing. The result — sometimes called the Dagar veena — was too heavy for the usual northern playing posture with a gourd on the shoulder, so he adopted the southern posture instead, one gourd on the floor and one on the left knee.

The family's circumstances after 1947 were hard. With the princely states abolished, the Dagars lost the Udaipur court's patronage and eventually moved to Mumbai, where by his son Bahauddin's account they spent some twenty-five years working in garages, selling bread and occasionally playing for film scores, without a house or even a tanpura of their own, in a climate sceptical of dhrupad and long alaps.

He toured widely and taught in residencies at the American Society for Eastern Arts in Berkeley, the Rotterdam Conservatory, the University of Washington and the University of California. In 1982 he set up a gurukul near Panvel, outside Mumbai, to teach a small circle of disciples. He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1981 and the Kalidas Samman from the Madhya Pradesh government in 1986, and died on 28 September 1990. His students include his son Ustad Bahauddin Dagar, Pandit Uday Bhawalkar, Pushparaj Koshti, Ritwik Sanyal and the Gundecha Brothers.

Some of the fullest documentation of his playing was made in the United States. The University of Washington's Ethnomusicology Archives filmed and recorded him repeatedly between 1975 and 1986 — film sessions, a 1977 concert, and the March 1986 Seattle concerts with his brother from which the Abhogi, Vardhani and Yaman releases were later drawn.

His playing is remembered for extreme slowness and for a refusal of display: the interest lies in the shaping of individual notes and the glides between them across a very long decay. The instrument he designed is inseparable from that approach — the extra sustain is what makes the pace possible.