Ali akbar khan

The Centennial Tribute to Maestro Ali Akbar Khan is a large family affair, and we encourage you to join with us in celebrating his life and his glorious music. Khansahib, as he is commonly referred to, was larger than life while remaining humble and accessible. These dualities may be one of the reasons students came to the Ali Akbar College of Music and never left. He was a true master musician. This was evident in his classes—taught over a forty-year period—as well as in his concerts and recordings. It is our great pleasure to offer this platform to you all to reminisce, rediscover, and celebrate the brilliance and humanity of Khansahib. Please come back again and again, share this website with your friends and families, and enjoy! Over the next year we will be adding more tributes and events to revel in together. We want you to get to know the incomparable man we all love and admire, and we will do our best to keep him alive through these offerings. With our warm regards! The AACM Family

1 of3 Indian classical music great Ali Akbar Khan will celebrate 80th birthday this month with a concert. Photographed with a 25 string sarode at the Ali Akbar School of Music, 215 West End Avenue, San Rafael. BY CHRIS STEWART/THE CHRONICLE CHRIS STEWART 2 of3 Indian classical music great Ali Akbar Khan will celebrate 80th birthday this month with a concert. Photographed with a 25 string sarode and with his son Alam, 19, at the Ali Akbar School of Music, 215 West End Avenue, San Rafael. BY CHRIS STEWART/THE CHRONICLE CHRIS STEWART 3 of3 • • • A converted bridge club in central San Rafael may not be the most likely place to find one of the great masters of Indian classical music, but Ali Akbar Khan has been teaching students from all over the world in his spartan school for nearly 30 years. A stained-glass window in the second-story lecture hall is the only feature that distinguishes the Ali Akbar The small, quiet man about to turn 80 still gives six classes a week at the school where he has taught more than 10,000 students while also performing as many as 30 concerts a year around the world. He will be feted on the occasion of his 80th birthday by a variety of devoted students -- including his 19-year- old son, Alam, and an older son, Aashish, 62, who both learned the sarod from the instrument's greatest master -- in an all-day event tomorrow at the "You cannot learn in one year or two years," said Khan. "To learn sarod, you must practice eight to 12 hours a day for 20 yea...

The son of influential Hindustani musician In 1955, Khan accepted an invitation from Menuhin to perform in the United States. In addition to performing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he recorded the first Western album of Indian classical music and became the first Indian music on an American television when he appeared on In 1956, Khan founded the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music in Calcutta. Teaching in the United States since 1965, he opened the Ali Akbar College of Music in Berkeley, CA, two years later. (In 1968, the school moved to a new site in San Rafael.) Khan taught six classes a week for nine months a year. In the early '90s, the school opened branches in Fremont, CA, and Basel, Switzerland. The lengthy list of films featuring Khan's music includes Chetan Anand's Aandhiyan, AllMusic Quiz

Tabla player Zakir Hussain (left) accompanies sarod player Ali Akbar Khan and his wife and collaborator Mary Khan. Courtesy of the Owsley Stanley Foundation In May of 1970, at a San Francisco concert venue best known for reverberating with the sounds of the Bear's Sonic Journals: That Which Colors the Mind. On that night, Indian sarod master Ali Akbar Khan was joined on stage by sitar player Indranil Bhattacharya and a 19-year-old percussionist named The language of the hippie generation may not have clicked for Hussain, but sitar maestro Ravi Shankar had already electrified the Woodstock and Monterey Pop festivals. The audience in San Francisco that night was primed to listen. "In India, I was used to playing with the audience chiming in," Hussain recalls. "Everybody saying 'Wow' and ... 'Do that again,' and all that stuff. But here the audience was quiet, eyes closed, meditative. The room was dark so you couldn't really make eye contact with the audience, and so you were left to rely on your interaction with your fellow musicians." Since his first American concert, Zakir Hussain has become perhaps the most famous tabla player in the world. He now lives in California, and he says it was this performance 50 years ago that showed him that Indian classical music could be played in the West in its purest form. "It really set the tone of how I would present myself to my fellow musicians — whoever I was accompanying — for the rest of my life." Capturing the performance in the h...