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Alam Khan extends family’s deep lineage in Indian music by blending tradition and adventure
At this year’s Indian Summer Festival, the sarod virtuoso draws on generations of musical mastery to create improvisations that reflect everything from audience response to the time of day
Alam Khan.
Indian Summer Festival presents Alam Khan at the Surrey Arts Centre on July 12 at 7:30 pm
ALAM KHAN DIDN’T have to go into the family business—but, then again, it’s possible that he didn’t have a choice.
The sarod virtuoso, who plays an Indian Summer Festival concert at the Surrey Arts Centre on July 12, is the son of the esteemed Ali Akbar Khan: friend and musical partner of sitarist Ravi Shankar, revered educator, maker of several dozen solo albums, and the man who almost single-handedly brought his instrument to the attention of the world beyond the Subcontinent. You’d think the pressure to follow in dad’s footsteps would be intense, but apparently not.
“I was born into it, but I wasn’t forced to play music at all,” the younger Khan explains in an interview from his Marin County, California, home. “I was encouraged, whether it was classical or other things, like guitar. My parents were both supportive of anything that I was doing musically, and I was definitely musically inclined, naturally, from a young age—drumming on things and humming and singing.
“So I had a real connection to music, and there were musicians around all the time,” he continues. “But my mother is an American, a Caucasian, so I’m mixed-race and mixed-cultures, and my life outside of home was very much like a normal American kid in the ’80s: primarily white friends, sports, riding around on bikes in the neighbourhood, whatever. But everything else was very much around the music. My mother and father worked together; my mother ran our record label, so everything around us was music and Indian culture—the food and different things like that. So that’s how bicultural my upbringing was, and music was as well.”
Given his interests, his location in the musically vital Bay Area, and his age, Khan could easily have become a rock drummer or jazz guitarist. Instead, his family tradition caught up with him when, as he explains, “I heard the calling.”
“I had been learning Indian music off and on—very much off and on, in a spotty kind of way—with voice and then with my instrument, the sarod, but I ended up putting it down for a while,” he says. “It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I really fell in love with the music. It just clicked for me, and once it did I couldn’t turn away. It had gotten hold of me.”
Today, that calling is stronger than ever. Through his advanced classes at the Ali Akbar College of Music, which opened its California branch in 1967, he’s continuing a tradition of pedagogy, if not bloodline, that goes back to the beginning of the Mughal Empire some five hundred years ago.
“We kind of all trace our lineages back to a single musician, Tansen, who was the court musician for the Mughal emperor Akbar, and the person that taught him was like a saint, basically: Swami Haridas,” Khan says. “All the factions that broke off from that were just kind of like styles—like schools of kung fu. You’ve got all of these different schools of thought, or gharanas, and in each of those schools they may have developed certain techniques, also like martial arts and kung fu, and also particular instruments that they excel at. But it’s mainly a style of teaching, and it’s compositional. A lot of compositions were written out of our raga system and became kind of like standards, if you will, for each gharana.
“My family style,” he continues, “is basically from my grandfather, Allauddin Khan, who learned from multiple different gharanas until, at the end of his life, he met his true guru, a true descendant of Tansen, the court musician. So basically he was accepted [as a student] after a whole lot of turmoil—that’s a whole other saga, and there have been books written on it—and then integrated all of the musical influences that he had had and learned into one cohesive playing style.”
The weight of tradition has not deterred Khan from pursuing his own wide-ranging musical interests. Current projects include the global-fusion band Grand Tapestry, an ongoing collaboration with innovative Southern rockers Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, and work with South African guitarist Derek Gripper, who has forged a unique blend of classical and West African idioms. “These are all people that I find inspiring to be around, just because they live and breathe music, as do I,” he points out. “You don’t always find people like that in your life, people that are more on a peer level that you can be inspired by. I like to be around the energy of it all and see how people create, and what comes out of collaboration. I know what I can do, but sometimes it’s nice to just be quiet and let somebody else talk.”
When the sarod virtuoso comes to Surrey, however, he’s be leading the conversation, and the language that he and tabla master Eman Hashimi will be speaking will be that of Hindustani tradition. Set and setting will play a part but, beyond that, intuition is paramount.
“The time of day is always one of the most important things to consider,” Khan says. “I mean, that’s already established every time I play; that’s just what happens. But as far as everything else, now that I know it’s a traditional classical thing, I will treat everything accordingly. What is the audience going to be like? Is it a learned audience? Is it a mixture of people who know, and people who don’t really know and aren’t used to it? How much time do I have to perform? All of these things help me decide how I’m going to move through things—and sometimes right when I get on the stage and start tuning my instrument, I’ll change my mind.”
Listen without preconceptions, then, but with warm anticipation. 
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