ALI AKBAR KHAN
A Living National Treasure in India
Photo: Lawson Knight

Is Ali Akbar Khan the world's greatest living musician? Concert violinist Yehudi Menuhin thought so, calling Khan "an absolute genius... the greatest musician in the world." Many have considered him the "Indian Johann Sebastian Bach." And they certainly think well of Khansahib in his native India, where he is a Living National Treasure. He's won so many awards in his homeland and around the world, from the BAMMIE, the Bill Graham Lifetime Achievement Award of the Bay Area Music Awards Foundation, all the way to the Padma Mibhusan-- the highest honor given to an Indian civilian. And he's been given honorary Doctorates, Grammie nominations. You name it. I could fill this entire article with a listing of Khansahib's awards.

What does it mean to be the world's greatest musician? What puts Ali Akbar Khan above the rest? Is this obvious to the uninitiated, or do you have to be an accomplished musician yourself to see it? The four of us Nathans had the opportunity to find out when Khansahib played at UCLA's Performing Arts series in February. 1999. We're not totally ignorant about Indian music. Our dear friends, the folks in Dreamtime Continuum, play various Indian instruments in their international compositions. Our oldest daughter has studied tablas (Indian drums) for several years, and was taking a college course in Music of India when we saw Ali Akbar Khan perform. We meditate and are familiar with the sounds of the tamboura, sitar and even the sarod. (Khansahib plays the 25 stringed sarod.) We weren't totally ignorant about Indian music-- just almost.

Was our background sufficient to comprehend the master's greatness when we heard him play? Yes! Easily. Right from the start. Here is my experience of the concert, which was my first experience of Khansahib and my first sarod concert:

We arrived at UCLA's Royce Hall disheveled and exhausted, as we always do when we arrive in LA from our ranch in Santa Ynez, 3 hours away. The San Franciscan in me says, "That's because when you get to LA, you're in LA." Narrow regional prejudices aside, it's a long drive. Royce Hall was quite a destination: modern and elegant. Also sold out. The stage was set with a low platform perhaps thirty feet wide and 15 feet deep, as is traditional for Indian music, where the players sit on the floor. Musicians came out onto the stage. The crowd was eager, applauding what turned out to be tamboura players accompanying the featured musicians. Tambouras are four stringed drone instruments made from huge gourds. They produce the deep vibration which serves as a background to the raga.

Ali Akbar Khan and his accompanist, Zakir Hussain, entered to enthusiastic applause. Hussain is worthy of an article himself. He plays the tablas, classical Indian twin drums that look like Mutt and Jeff. Zakir Hussain is a master's master tabla player, considered the world's greatest living percussionist by many. Like Khansahib, he a National Treasure in India and the recipient of every honor you can imagine. I saw Zakir Hussain and his ensemble, The Rhythm Experience, perform at UC Santa Barbara. They were absolutely, totally, over the top. I had no idea you could make sounds like that with drums. I wasn't the only one dazzled: We were sitting with musicians from the Dreamtime Continuum -- some pretty hot drummers-- and Homnath Upadhaya, one of the royal musicians to the King of Nepal and himself a master tabla player. Homnath was as wowed by Zakir Hussain as we were.

So-- back to Royce Hall. The players sat on stage. Two things struck me when I saw Ali Akbar Khan. The first was his graciousness and modesty as he took the stage. No visible ego, despite all his honors. The second thing which I noticed, and which really impressed me, was the ease with which he sat on the floor to play. Khansahib is 77 years old. I am 53. I couldn't sit down like that to save my life. A curious thing happened: As Ali Akbar Khan and Zakir Hussein began to play, my tiredness caught up with me. Did I fall asleep? Not really. I was drawn into a very deep meditation. Just yanked inside. No visualizations. No thoughts. I stayed in that place, awake, but not responding to anything around me. I could hear the music, but my mind couldn't grab on it.

Sometime later, I "came to", feeling like I'd had a good night's sleep. Khansahib was playing extremely complex music. I had never heard anything like it-- and Zakir Hussain's drumming was the perfect accompaniment. Nothing in my background prepared me for that combination of sounds and their obvious conscious relationship to each other. I became aware of my heart. I was hearing the music with the area of my body around my heart. My heart was throbbing, pulsating, expanding, reveling. Many musicians have moved me in my life-- but this level of refinement? Of elegance? I've felt that only the the meditation hall. The sensation was phenomenal. I remember a popular song, something about "playing my heart softly with his song." That comes closest to what I felt, but doesn't communicate its grace.

Shortly after realizing that my heart was listening to the music, I realized something else. I was flying. Sailing. Ecstatic. Oh, Boy! Was I having fun! The first raga ended, and the lights went up. Intermission. My family looked at each other. We were stoned. It's true. All of us. Blissed out. We got up and wandered into the lobby, too moved to speak.

The lobby was another experience. The concert was sold out-- Thousands of people surged out of the auditorium. A lovely group. Many people were from the Indian subcontinent, the women wearing punjabis and saris. Traditional clothes. We followed the crowd into the balmy (for February) night. What we heard was illuminating. One very well dressed American woman in her early 30's remarked, "I don't know. All I hear is 'Plink. Plink. Plink.'" She seemed disappointed and dismayed. We kept walking, stretching during half-time. Farther on, a trio of distinguished, white-haired folks walked together. One woman commented, "You know, it's almost like smoking marijuana."

We cracked up. I will not comment on this except to quote the words of one of my professors back in the 1960's, "Your nervous system is capable of creating all the chemicals you could ever want, all by itself." In my experience, this is true. I have very little experience with drugs, but lots of experience meditating and chanting. Another quote, this one from former California Governor Jerry Brown. The truest statement I've ever heard from a politician. Brown was asked to comment on the drug problems of modern youth. He said, "If you want to get high, meditate." So there it is, a little known fact. You could also listen to very good Indian music.

I understand that Indian music has been carefully and consciously designed to produce specific emotional and spiritual states. It isn't like Western music: Da-da-da-da Dumm! It doesn't lead the listener in a linear fashion from one place, to another: From a beginning, to a middle, to a climax at the end. Indian music is cyclical. It starts at one point, explores that according to very strict rhythmic rules, rises higher, circles around to the beginning, rises a bit more, explores some more, circles back, going around and around with the psyche, leading the listener inside and up, into higher levels of consciousness. The purpose of Indian music is to invite the divine into the room and into one's soul. It's not about getting high-- it's about getting to who one really is-- and what reality really is. And the bliss of the divine, the bliss of the inner world is just there, waiting to come to you. Pierce the veil, and there it is.

We felt pretty good, wandering around in the perfumed gardens near Royce Hall. Mock orange bushes put out a special olfactory display. As the crowd gravitated back to the Hall, my younger daughter remarked, "Now we have to go back and do that again." Yes, it's a rough life, but someone has to do it. Well, Khansahib and Zakir Hussain played with our souls a bit longer. Until we were pulp. Until we were ready to follow them around the world just to hear some more. (Fortunately, the existence of CD's makes this unnecessary.) The combination of brilliant percussion and the sublime sarod was incredible. At one point, the two men really cranked it out-- really rocked. They flew! I laughed to myself, thinking, "This is real rock'n'roll." People don't realize this: These guys rock out-- in a very conscious way. The state we had achieved at the intermission was only the beginning.

We finally flowed out into the night, discovering again what we'd found at the intermission: Our pals from Dreamtime Continuum were seated right behind us: Tabla players Jeff Lidke and David Auwe. Hari Bol. Maybe a few more. This was weird-- and the same thing happened at the Zakir Hussain concert. We didn't confer with our friends about going to the concert or buy our tickets together-- yet here we were, right next to each other, in two sold out Halls. Why? Why should such a coincidence occur? Swiss psychologist Carl Jung called it "synchronicity"-- the apparently random coming together of events and people which have inner connections. Indian music is about spirit, and spirit moves the world as it wants. Like souls are drawn together for some larger business. Unexpectedly, you find yourself in the company of friends receiving what you need to receive.

***

A few days after Khansahib's concert, something happened. I stood in my kitchen, still savoring what I'd heard at Royce Hall. I saw something in the LA Times that shocked me silly. Three American rock groups had just embarked on a tour. The Times carried a very large picture of one act's opener: The band's leader, wearing an almost nonexistent, sadomasochistic "costume", was carried to the stage attached to a cross in the manner of Jesus Christ. I couldn't believe it. Wherever they were playing was apparently sold out. The article went on to describe the obscene language and behavior of the musicians toward their audiences. Even the groups' names were revolting. I was sick. I couldn't imagine people paying to be treated with such disrespect, or paying an individual who would engage in the blasphemy immortalized in the photo. Yet, there it was.

Khansahib's gentle humility and his consummate musicianship returned to me as I looked at the newspaper. Music is taken very seriously in India. Ali Akbar Khan began his musical studies at the age of 3, taking lessons from his father, the late Padma Vibusan Acharya Dr. Allauddin Khan, who is acknowledged as the greatest figure in North Indian music in the 20th century. The Khans' ancestral musical tradition (gharana) traces back to the 16th century court of Emperor Akbar. Ali Akbar Khan was trained in a number of instruments by his father and his uncle, Fakir Aftabuddin. For over 20 years, Khansahib practiced 18 hours a day. His father continued to train his son until he was over 100 years old. Even when he died, Khansahib's father left him with enough musical instructions to inspire Khansahib for the rest of his days.

This approach is not how we do popular music: Some kid decides at age eleven that he wants to play electric guitar in a band. He wanders down to a local music store and studies until he can throw together enough notes in reasonable order that someone will listen. He finds a number of like-minded kids somewhere and forms a band. To entertain us with travesties in the name of art.

In India, music is a sacred thing to be approached as one would God. The relationship between student and teacher is a lifelong one, in which the student must prove himself worthy of receiving more knowledge. Music exists to facilitate the listeners' experience of the divine. A famous story involving another Indian National Living Treasure, Ravi Shankar, illustrates the difference between the Indian and Western approach to music. Ravi Chance, the famous sitar player who the Beatles introduced to the West, was invited to play at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1976 . Ravi enjoyed the concert very much as he waited to play. In the material accompanying his 75th birthday commemorative CD's, Ravi, Shankar says, "I enjoyed Janis Joplin's very much. I liked her gutsiness." Not so enjoyable was the performance of . In the manner fashionable at the time, they ignited their guitars at the end of the performance. Ravi Shankar was so appalled by this violence against music and musical instruments that he could not play. He was willing to pay the Festival's large fine for not appearing rather than play under such circumstances. The events' organizers finally realized exactly how upset Shankar was and set a special time for his performance the next day, solving the problem.

What would Ravi think if he saw that photo in the LA Times?

I was planning to end this piece after whining a bit about contemporary values. Why should "musicians" whose message consists of blasphemy and obscenity fill auditoriums nationwide? Why should they make tons of money appealing to people's lowest natures? Why should some people hear Ali Akbar Khan and just get, "Plink. plink. Plink" ? Why? Why? Why?

Well, I don't get to write the ending that way. The good old LA Times brought news of the big tour today: It collapsed. They quit halfway through, brought down by low sales, their own inability to get along, and injury to the fellow making his entrance on the cross. Gee.

Maybe justice does exist. Ali Akbar Khan has been playing his message of tranquility and elevation for decades. At 77 years old, he makes his concert dates and wows people in their teens. Quality lasts. Maybe we shouldn't give up on the world.

If you get the chance to see Ali Akbar Khan, do it! In the meantime, you can enjoy his music in recorded form. We're putting together a Bookstore which will benefit The Prison Project, a charitable organization. Very soon, you'll be able to order the music of Ali Akbar Khan and Zakir Hussain right here, and benefit people round the world!

3/23/99

Note: Information about Ali Akbar Khan and Zakir Hussain came from the UCLA Performing Arts Program, February 1999, pp. P-7 to P-9.