Family rhythm
The Khan men keep a tradition alive.

By Derk Richardson

IMAGINE YOU ARE a teenage musician, a year or so out of high school. Your father has toured the world for decades, performing concerts, garnering an embarrassment of honorary titles and awards, and teaching thousands of students. Now he has decided to anoint you his heir apparent. But accepting the mantle means not just following in the footsteps of a living legend but also preserving and promulgating a musical tradition that dates back nearly 500 years.

That's the position 19-year-old Alam Khan finds himself in, as his father, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, one of the most influential and celebrated Indian musicians of all time, celebrates his 80th birthday this Saturday with a gala concert at the Marin Veterans Auditorium in San Rafael. In conjunction with the all-day event, the Khans' family-run record label, Alam Madina Music Productions, has issued a new CD, From Father to Son, on which Khansahib (as the maestro is respectfully addressed) and Alam, both playing the 25-string lutelike sarod, perform the ancient evening raga "Ragini Puriya Dhansari." The CD, recorded in concert in Berkeley last year, is billed as "a passing of the torch."

Alam, who plays in a hip-hop band and experiments in a digital home-recording studio when he's not practicing the Hindustani (northern Indian) classical repertoire of his father's lineage, finds the designation daunting. "My life is a ball of tension," he says in response to a question directed at him during an interview with his famous father. "It definitely makes me nervous." Alam, his 10-year-old sister Madina, and their mother, Mary, are sitting cross-legged on the thick-pile green carpet in the spacious music room of the Ali Akbar College of Music (AACM) in San Rafael. They form a semicircle at the feet of Khansahib, who is seated in a white armchair, sipping from a mug of black Indian tea between lengthy, often wry reminiscences about his own grueling musical apprenticeship and his long award-laden career in music.

"I am just an ant," Alam says, noting that his musical role on From Father to Son is that of accompanist not yet worthy of playing actual duets with Khansahib. "He is an anteater," he adds, nodding toward his paternal guru.

Seventy-some years ago Ali Akbar Khan was in a similar situation. He began his musical tutelage at age three, studying drums with his uncle, Fakir Aftabuddin, and vocal and instrumental music with his father, Allauddin Khan. Western pop music progeny like Sean Lennon, Dweezil Zappa, or Ziggy Marley might think they have big shoes to fill. But when Ali Akbar Khan, at his father's insistence, committed himself to playing sarod and dedicating his life to music, he was accepting stewardship of an artistic bloodline that descended directly from Mian Tansen, the genius court musician of 16th-century emperor Akbar. If there is a parallel in Western music, it might be being told you are single-handedly responsible for upholding the legacy of Bach, except that Johann Sebastian peaked in the 18th century, and his dynasty petered out in the 19th.

Khansahib's father, commonly regarded as the most important single force in 20th-century Hindustani music, not only entrusted his son with carrying on the ancestral tradition – the Seni Baba Allauddin gharana – but he also commissioned him to spread the music "as far as the sun and moon." Khansahib has certainly made good on his obligations. In 1955, at the invitation of violinist Yehudi Menuhin, he presented the first concert of Indian music in the United States (at the Museum of Modern Art in New York). Shortly thereafter he released the first Western LP of Hindustani music and was the first Indian musician to perform on American television (on Omnibus). In 1956 he founded the Ali Akbar College of Music in Calcutta; 11 years later he established its U.S. counterpart. Over the ensuing three and a half decades he has been awarded a half dozen doctorates, the highest civilian honor in India (the Padma Vibhusan Award), the Mahatma Gandhi Cultural Award in England, the National Endowment for the Arts' National Heritage Fellowship, and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and also has received five Grammy nominations. Even his hypercritical taskmaster father, who lived more than 100 years, finally recognized his son's talents, bestowing on him the title Swara Samrat, "Emperor of Melody."

Khansahib characterizes the 20 years of intensive study under his father's relentless scrutiny as "living like a prisoner ... without so much fatherly and motherly affection ... I had to wait every second for my father's mood." His moist eyes flickering with mischief behind thick spectacles, Khansahib describes one strategy he employed to give himself a break from the grueling routine of practice (as much as 12 to 18 hours a day). When his father would go out to the market, a neighbor in a nearby building would open and close his windows to signal the young Khan, who would relax and maybe smoke a cigarette. Alerted to his father's impending return, the son would return to his practice position and pour water all over himself, making it look like he'd worked up a heavy sweat.

In the old days master musicians refused to take on students from outside their families, Khansahib explains, and they would not waste their time on even their own sons if the latter did not demonstrate total commitment to the music. "In my time, I was not allowed to have friends; there were no movies, no record players, not even any books were allowed in the home," he recalls. "Everything was checked, censored by my father. I hated my father. Now, after many years, I love my father, and I'm grateful to him. So half of my life I hated him, the rest of my life I loved him."

Khansahib's love is palpable in his music, documented on more than 75 recordings. The degree to which he has developed and refined his playing – his technical mastery of the instrument combined with his command of emotional nuance (in a music defined by improvisational facility and expression of subtle moods) – is unprecedented. His love is further embodied in his commitment to sharing the wisdom and joy of the musical tradition. You will try in vain to come up with any Western classical musician on Khansahib's level of virtuosity and creativity who is so selflessly devoted to teaching. In the 35 years since he established the AACM, Khansahib has given instruction to approximately 10,000 students. He still leads vocal and instrumental classes, for rank beginners as well as experienced practitioners, three nights a week in San Rafael, nine months a year; he usually tours Europe and the Middle East in November, teaching for a week or two at an AACM branch in Basel, Switzerland, and spends December and January performing and teaching in India. Khansahib's 80th birthday gala marks the launch of an AACM capital campaign to build a library that will house the archive of tens of thousands of compositions, as well as tapes, books, and videos documenting 500 years of the Seni Baba Allauddin gharana.

Notions of pedagogical discipline have relaxed over the years, and Khansahib realizes that his students, including his sons, will practice on their own schedule, hang out with friends, and pursue other interests. He doesn't even try to be strict. But his core values have not changed. "When you are doing something to make money, at that moment, music is gone," Khansahib says. "You're thinking market value and spoiling yourself and the listener also. You think a lot of money is good, you enjoy it, and then one day you realize that it is nothing." Had he more actively pursued notoriety, the name "Ali Akbar Khan" might be as well known as that of sitar master Ravi Shankar, who arrived later in the West but made a bigger splash by virtue of his influence on the Beatles and his appearance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Shankar studied with Khansahib's father, and the contemporaries recorded and performed together many times, including a historic Madison Square Garden duet at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh. "His aim was to get more audience, more audience, more audience, like a hit picture," Khansahib says of Shankar. "Sometimes he would say to me, 'Why don't you play with me, a little duet section, for the box office?' So I worked for the box office for him sometimes, then I said, I don't need any box."

Playing to please an audience, he adds, is like telling someone, "Oh, I love you so much," when there's really no love there at all. Khansahib allows that on occasion he will begin a concert somewhat mechanically, like a pilot flipping switches in a cockpit. But then he will concentrate on one note. "You must hear the sound in your soul, then your brain and heart can focus more clearly," he says. "When I put one sound in the right place, the whole thing changes. I become the audience now. Somebody else is playing, and I am enjoying it."

Khansahib will be in the audience while others – including the AACM Orchestra and the AACM Tabla Ensemble, vocalist Pandit Jasraj, bansuri master G.S. Sachdev, violinist Sisirkana Dhar Chowdhury, tabla masters Zakir Hussain and Swapan Chaudhuri, dancer Chitresh Das and company, and the Alam and Aashish Khan duo – perform at his birthday gala. He takes the celebration with the proverbial grain of salt, largely because his birthdays went unobserved during his childhood. "My father and mother never told me it was my birthday when I was young," he says. "They used to make some good food, but why I didn't know. I'd think, oh, there's some good food today. But they never would say, 'It's your birthday,' so I'm not used to this kind of thing." The gala's accompanying ritual – the passing of the torch – will not dramatically impact Khansahib's life, either. He will continue to play and teach until "the soul leaves, the heart stops, and the body turns to mud." Music "is like my breath," he says. "As long as I can take breath, I take breath. I don't stop."

'A Gala Tribute to Ali Akbar Khan,' Sat/13, 1-5 p.m. and 7-11 p.m., Marin Veteran's Auditorium, Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael. $20-$60. (415) 472-3500. For more information call the Ali Akbar College of Music at (415) 454-6264 or go to www.aacm.org.