ALI AKBAR KHAN was the foremost virtuoso of the lutelike sarod, whose dazzling technique and gift for melodic invention, often displayed in concert with his brother-in-law Ravi Shankar, helped popularise North Indian classical music in the West.
Khan, who died of kidney failure on June 18 at his home in San Anselmo, California, at the age of 87, was named a "national treasure" by the Indian government in 1989.
He had carried on the musical traditions of his father, Allauddin Khan, whose ashram in East Bengal produced some of India's most celebrated musicians, notably Mr Shankar.
Unlike his father, a volatile and uneven performer, Mr Khan maintained an austere demeanour onstage while coaxing passages of extraordinary intensity from his sarod, an instrument with 25 strings, ten plucked with a piece of coconut shell while the remainder resonate sympathetically.
The violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who took Mr Khan to the US in 1955, called him "an absolute genius" and "the greatest musician in the world."
In 1971, Mr Khan performed at Madison Square Garden with Mr Shankar, Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty on a bill with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and other rock stars at the Concert for Bangladesh, a benefit organised by the now-late former Beatle George Harrison and Mr Shankar. The album and film of the two performances gave added exposure to Mr Khan and North Indian music.
The musician was born in Shibpur, a small village in Bengal (now Bangladesh) in 1922. He grew up in Maihar, where his father – a notoriously hard taskmaster – was the principal musician in the court of the maharajah. The boy began vocal training at three and, after studying the surbahar, sitar and tabla, chose to focus on the sarod.
Allauddin Khan had elevated the status of instrumental music, previously regarded as inferior to vocal performance, by synthesising various regional styles into a modern concert style. His son absorbed his encyclopedic knowledge of North Indian music and eventually outstripped him as an instrumentalist.
At 13, Mr. Khan performed for a large audience for the first time, at a music conference in the holy city of Allahabad. By his early 20s he was music director of All-India Radio in Lucknow, broadcasting as a solo artist and composing for the radio's orchestra.
"My father's main purpose was to hear me play while he was living in Maihar, because I was always being broadcast," Mr Khan once said. "If I played anything wrong, he would come the next day to Lucknow, straight from the train station, tell me to get my sarod and listen to me play and correct me."
For part of a series of 78s that he recorded in Lucknow for HMV in 1945, he composed and performed the three-minute Raga Chandranandan (Moonstruck), a blend of four evening ragas, which became a national hit and his signature piece. He later recorded a 22-minute version for the album Master Musician of India on the Connoisseur label. He later left Lucknow to become the court musician for the maharajah of Jodhpur. He performed, often for hours at a time; gave lessons; and composed for the court orchestra. The post vanished after the maharajah died in a plane crash in 1948.
Defying his father, Mr Khan moved to Bombay and began writing scores for films. His father, a friend of the director of Hungry Stones, went to see the film and said: "My goodness, who composed the music? He is great." On being told it was his son, the elder Khan sent a telegram of forgiveness.
Western interest in Indian music soared after George Harrison took up the sitar and Mr Shankar began touring Europe and the US. In 1967 Mr Khan, who had founded a music school in Calcutta in 1956, started the Ali Akbar College of Music, now in California, with a satellite school in Basel, Switzerland.
In 1989 he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honour, and in 1991 he be-came the first Indian musician to receive a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. He is survived by his wife, seven sons including Aashish, a renowned sarod player; and four daughters.
