Ali Akbar Khan, Legend of Hindustani Classical Music: 1922-2009

World Music Central is reporting that Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, one of the world's greatest living Classical Indian musicians, passed away at his home in California on June 18. He was 88 years old.

Ustad Ali Akbar Khan was a sarod (a lute-like Indian instrument) player in the Hindustani (Northern Indian) tradition. The title "Ustad" means "Master," and the title was bestowed upon him by the Maharajah of Jodhpur in the 1940s, a rare honor for a young man. Khan was the first musician to record an LP of Indian Classical Music in the United States, and he founded a college of music in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s, where thousands of students have since studied. He won the MacArthur Genius Grant and the National Endowment for the Arts' National Heritage Fellowship, and he had street cred in the rock and roll community, too, having performed at the fabled Concert for Bangladesh with Ravi Shankar, sharing the bill with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and most of the Beatles.

Read World Music Central's Obituary, and if you want some introductory listening, check out Then and Now: The Music of the Great Master Continues (Compare Prices) - it's a two-disc set that contains both the original ragas he recorded in 1955, as well as two that he recorded in 1995, 40 years later.

Image (c) Ammp Records, 1995