Aftaab-e-Sitar : Ustad Vilayat Khan - Page 3

Ustad Vilayat Khan: The orthodox revolutionary

Epochal artists provoke only adulation or criticism during their lifetimes. The interpretation of their art and their contribution begins only after they have departed from the scene. This is proving to be true of Ustad Vilayat Khan (1927-2004). This essay is a small contribution to this process. For the confidence with which I make my observations, I rely on four decades of training in the Vilayat Khan style of music, the intensive interaction I have had with the Ustad, a study of a substantial archive of his music, and decades of tutelage with the eminent scholar-musician, Pt. Arvind Parikh, the Ustad's most senior disciple.

The personality

Vilayat Khan's was a personality shaped by the conviction that it was destined to leave its mark on the world. He would not have been happy with just being the greatest sitarist; he had to be amongst the all-time greats of Hindustani music. This set him on a path of passionate absorption of the tradition, unrelenting innovation and the pursuit of superhuman standards of perfection in the execution of his musical vision.

The burning ambition that powered Vilayat Khan's destiny was, partially, a reaction to the humiliations and privations suffered early in life. He had a very comfortable childhood as the elder son of Ustad Enayet Khan, court musician at Gauripur (now in Bangladesh). After he lost his father at the age of eleven, the most prosperous and eminent amongst his father's disciples denied him the training of his gharana (stylistic lineage), and abandoned the family to virtual destitution. This experience re-activated - after five generations - the Rajput (a warrior tribe) genes of Thakur Srujan Singh, the founder of his lineage. Vilayat Khan left Calcutta in his early teens in search of training and a career, and swore not to return until he had become India's foremost Sitarist.

These forces shaped Vilayat Khan into an essentially elitist musician. But, his was not an elitism of the snobbish category that makes music inaccessible to the majority. His repertoire was dominated by popular raga-s and tala-s, and always had a reasonable component of semi-classical music. His elitism made him place a premium on the approval of the cognoscenti, and made him averse to populism of every variety. He challenged his audiences with his elaborate architecture, richness of musical content, and sophisticated presentation.

Attempts have been made to portray Vilayat Khan as a representative of the romanticist movement in 20th century Hindustani music. Amongst instrumentalists, he was, without doubt, the peerless master of the romanticist genres. However, Vilayat Khan defies simplistic classification. He rendered profound music at the highest level of classicism and semi-classical and folk repertoire with heart-rending impact. Irrespective of the genre he performed, aloofness remained a basic quality of his music, as much as it was of his persona.

The Ustad often quoted the aphorism - "When you sit on the stage, perform with the authority of an Ustad. But, when you listen, no matter how insignificant the musician, listen with the receptivity of a disciple." He saw the artist as having a hotline to God, and artistic expression as a "Revelation," which audiences ought to receive in a spirit of reverence. The core of elitism in his personality never allowed him to drift towards titillation, populism or kitsch.

His aloofness and elitism were an integral part of the feudal values acquired in early childhood. He had grown up amongst the nobility, and valued their cultivation of the arts, as also their standards of propriety and decorous conduct. As a corollary, he had only contempt for the credentials of the democratic state as a patron of the arts, and for the crassness of the culture nourished by bourgeois capitalism after independence. He stuck steadfastly to his values, and willingly paid the price for so doing.

The presence

Ustad Vilayat Khan saw himself as an orthodox musician. The world of music, however, considers him a revolutionary musician. The clue to the mismatch of perceptions lies in that he was steeped in the vocalist tradition, while he expressed this commitment on the sitar. He revolutionized sitar music, which, until his father's era, had evolved as an extension of the traditional Rudra Veena idiom, though severely constrained in its melodic content by the instrument's limitations as an acoustic machine.

Circumstances drove Vilayat Khan into the orbit of vocalism during his most formative years. Consequently, he most wanted to sing, while family pride obliged him to become a sitarist. So, he did everything necessary to make the sitar sing. Vilayat Khan worked on the basic design of the sitar, its ergonomics, and its idiom to give it a new voice in Hindustani music. Vilayat Khan now enjoys so large a presence on the Hindustani music-scape, that it is difficult to determine which of the two traditions he hijacked - the vocal or the instrumental.

Formative influences

Vilayat Khan is inconceivable without Enayet Khan. However, Enayet Khan is far from sufficient to explain Vilayat Khan. Vilayat Khan was largely a self-taught musician, who built a magnificent edifice of esthetically coherent music out of inputs from various sources.

Young Vilayat Khan had received only five or six years of training when his father departed. But, by then, he had already recorded two ragas on 78 RPM disc in the thoroughbred technique and idiom of his father. However, by the time of Enayet Khan's departure, sitar music was poised for a great leap forward because of revolutionary changes in the acoustic environment and audience profiles. Only an instrumentalist unfettered by the sitarist tradition of those times could have achieved such a leap. In this sense, Vilayat Khan's personal tragedy turned out to be a historic event for the evolution of the sitar.

In the 1930s, the stranglehold of heredity over musicianship was such that it ruled out the grooming of Vilayat Khan by a sitarist from another gharana (stylistic lineage). Even the possibility of half a solution vanished when his father's disciples deserted him. Vilayat Khan's search for training took him to Nahan in Punjab, the home of his maternal grandfather, Ustad Bande Hassan Khan and uncle, Ustad Zinda Hassan Khan, both eminent Khayal vocalists. Though, in later years, he also studied the Surbahar under his father's brother, Ustad Waheed Khan, his years at Nahan were the most formative years of his life, and had the greatest impact on his evolution as a musician, because they cast Vilayat Khan's ideation process decisively into the vocalist mold. Traces of this influence were evident when Vilayat Khan sang, taught vocal music, and through the style of his Khayal compositions. Other vocalists, however, came later to dominate his vocalized idiom on the sitar.

The dominant influence on Vilayat Khan's musical vision came from Kirana maestros, Ustad Abdul Kareem Khan and Ustad Abdul Waheed Khan. He had memorized every single 78 RPM recording of Abdul Kareem Khan, and could render it verbatim. Vilayat Khan captured the essence of Abdul Waheed Khan's music through his principal follower, Ustad Ameer Khan. Ameer Khan, had also been influenced by Rajabali Khan of Dewas, whose music incorporated features of the Jaipur-Atrauli style of Ustad Alladiya Khan. In addition, Vilayat Khan greatly admired Ustad Faiyyaz Khan of Agra gharana, with whom he was on intimate terms. In addition to these major influences, Vilayat Khan adopted some features from the music of several other vocalists - Kesarbai Kerkar, Pt. Omkarnath Thakur, and Zohrabai Agrewali, to name a few. For his stroke-craft, he drew generously on the percussion idiom of the Tabla, the Pakhawaj, and even the Tasha and Nakkara, kettle-drums used as accompaniment to the Shehnai.

Vilayat Khan was not wedded to the musical values of any gharana except his own. His melodic imagination was not even as dependent on vocal music as is widely believed. He picked up musical ideas from every source that appealed to him, and integrated them into a style which was distinctively his own. His was an exceptional musical mind, aided by a photographic memory, which retained and processed musical inputs in a mysterious manner. One day, for instance, Vilayat Khan invited a beggar woman from the street to sing for him, paid her generously, and rendered her song as a bandish at a concert the next evening. Equally typical was the melodic idea he picked up from the chimes of the Big Ben in London, and adapted it as a composition in raga Hansadhwani for a concert the following day.

Vilayat Khan, the vocalist

In compliance with a promise he had given to his mother, Vilayat Khan never presented a full-fledged vocal concert. But, he did not entirely deprive his fans of his competence and charm as a vocalist. He made it a practice - in most concerts - to sing parts of his performance along with their rendition on the sitar. Vilayat Khan's fans vouch that if the Ustad did not sing even once in a concert, they felt cheated. He not only had the mind of a vocalist, but also a trained, authoritative voice.

He coached several students - amateur and professional - in vocal music. He had studied the styles of many 20th century masters of Khayal and Thumree and, though only in private, often did remarkably authentic impersonations of them. In his memoirs, The raga of my life, Arvind Parikh has recorded that shortly before her demise, Begum Akhtar, the empress of Ghazal and the semi-classical genres had started studying with the Ustad, and had wished to be formally initiated as a disciple. The contemporary Khayal maestro, Ulhas Kashalkar, sought the Ustad's guidance in his last years, and studied several of his raga creations and bandish-es with him.

Vilayat Khan, the surbahar player

In Ustad Vilayat Khan's gharana, musicians were routinely trained on the sitar as well as the surbahar (a magnified and bass version of the sitar). This tradition was a part of the 19th century practice of presenting the elaborate Rudra Veena/Dhrupad-style alap on the surbahar followed by post-Dhrupad bandish-es on the sitar. In this tradition, Vilayat Khan had studied the Surbahar with his father's brother, Ustad Waheed Khan. However, according to the Ustad, his mother prevailed upon him to cede the surbahar territory to his younger brother, Ustad Imrat Khan.

By and large, he respected this arrangement. As a result, both the instruments gained by having outstanding specialists from the same stylistic lineage. Vilayat Khan did, however, do at least one concert on the surbahar in Bombay in the late 1970s. Towards the end of his life, he also did two recordings - Kafi Kanada for India Archive Music, New York and Bilaskhani Todi for Navras Records, UK. The three recordings are proof of the command the Ustad had over the instrument.

His performing style on the surbahar moved away from the traditional Dhrupad idiom followed by his father and grandfather and was in tune with the stylistic orientations of the post-Dhrupad era. In conformity with the tradition, however, Vilayat Khan performed only the solo prelude (alap-jod-jhala) on the surbahar, and never performed percussion-accompanied music on the instrument.

Vilayat Khan, the duet artist

Vilayat Khan had a minor, but distinguished, presence as a duet artist. During the 1950's he did several memorable concerts with the sarod maestro, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, whom he admired immensely. He also launched a partnership with the violinist, Gajananrao Joshi, which turned out to be short-lived. During the 1960s, he released two LPs of duets with his brother, Ustad Imrat Khan, on the surbahar - Chandni Kedar and Miya-ki Malhar. Both are regarded amongst the finest pieces of instrumental music recorded in the latter half of the 20th century. Thereafter, the sitar-surbahar duet of the brothers was also featured sporadically on the concert circuit. Starting from the 1980s, Vilayat Khan occasionally performed duets with his son, Shujaat Khan, on the surbahar.

By far the most durable, and also successful, partnership the Ustad enjoyed was with the Shehnai maestro, Ustad Bismillah Khan. It was a reflection of their mutual affection and respect, as much as their parity in stature and compatibility as musicians. Their concerts were always sold out, and their recordings are prized collector's items.

Vilayat Khan and film music

Not surprisingly for an elitist musician - and much like classical music stalwarts of his generation - Vilayat Khan's formal involvement in film music was negligible. He composed and conducted the score for three feature films - Satyajit Ray's Jalsaghar in Bengali, Merchant-Ivory Productions' The Guru in English, and Madhusudan Kumar's Kadambari in Hindi. In addition to these, he also gave music for a little known documentary film in Bengali produced by Dr. Barin Roy. The score for Ray's Jalsaghar won a national award.

The repertoire

Vilayat Khan's gharana has a tradition of specializing in a few raga-s for concert performance. His grandfather, Ustad Imdad Khan, for instance, became the most influential sitar and surbahar player of his times by concentrating on just two ragas: Yaman and Puriya. Likewise, his father, Ustad Enayet Khan, an equally influential sitarist, performed very few raga-s. The gharana has performed almost entirely in Teentala. Vilayat Khan's own repertoire of raga-s was probably larger than either of his immediate ancestors because he was addressing a larger and more diverse audience through a variety of media. He also stuck to Teental, except for a rare Khayal bandish rendered in Ektala. In semi-classical music, however, Vilayat Khan often performed in Dadra and Keherva.

Vilayat Khan sought greater and greater depth in the exploration of a limited range of mature melodic ideas rather than enlarge the span of coverage. In line with this philosophy, he never considered his musicianship adequate for rendering a particular raga. Pt. Arvind Parikh who has watched his Ustad practice for a concert, reports that Vilayat Khan tried out every phrase of a raga in a variety of ways until it delivered the desired melodic and acoustic result, and practiced it for as long as it took to perfect it before a performance. Only the flashes of spontaneous brilliance relied on chance. The hard core of every raga was subjected to serious exploration in isolation and ruthless preparation for punctilious execution.

An inventory of his raga repertoire has been compiled based on a survey of about 200 hours of concert and published recordings starting from 1950. Over 80% of his concerts and commercial recordings are of ragas currently classified as common or popular. About 15% may be considered rare. And, 5% of the ragas performed by him are those that the Hindustani (North Indian) music has recently adopted from the Carnatic (South Indian) tradition.

Not surprisingly, Vilayat Khan had little enthusiasm for creating new raga-s. He did, on occasion, experiment with idiosyncratic interpretations of mature ragas. Only two of them sustained his interest, and evolved towards some kind of independent raga-ness: Enayet Khani Kanada (initially named Vilayat Khani Kanada) and Sanjh Saravali. In the last two decades of his life, he explored these two "raga-s" with reasonable seriousness. Of the two, Sanjh Saravali is the more significant. With its seeds having germinated in the mid-1970s, Sanjh Saravali had a long history of sustained evolution. By the time the Ustad recorded it for India Archive Music in 1991, it had matured sufficiently to yield perhaps the greatest piece of instrumental music recorded in the latter half of the 20th century. In response to its creator's involvement in it, Sanjh Saravali acquired a following during his own lifetime. Ulhas Kashalkar, the distinguished contemporary vocalist, studied the raga with the Ustad, and started performing it. This development triggered off considerable interest in the raga amongst younger vocalists.

Starting from the 1980s, Ustad Vilayat Khan also found the Raga-Malika an increasingly convenient and popular means of ending a concert. The raga-base for the link-chain was most commonly Khamaj, but occasionally Piloo, and rarely Bhairavi. He rendered the Raga-Malika either in pure alap format or in alap and bandish format. He used this format to present glimpses of a variety of common ragas.

Amongst raga-s, Bhairavi remained his all-time favourite. He performed Bhairavi more frequently, and in more varied treatments, than any other raga. In fact, it can be said, that Vilayat Khan had a lifelong romance with Bhairavi.

The Gayaki Anga

The term "Gayaki Anga" refers to that facet of Ustad Vilayat Khan's music that enabled him to simulate the experience of vocalism in all phases of the rendition. The classification distinguishes his music from the "Tantkar Anga" (the idiom of the plucked instruments) which was performed on the Sitar until the era of his father, Ustad Enayet Khan. The "Tantkar Anga," being fundamental to the technology of music making on the sitar, can never be jettisoned. Any sitarist of stature has to be a master of the "Tantkar Anga" before he can do anything more with the instrument. If he decides to move towards vocalism, he can, at best, create an illusion of a vocal recital by transcending technical limitations. And, this is precisely what Vilayat Khan achieved.

Modern vocalism differs so fundamentally from the music of the plucked instruments, that it is impossible to identify all the elements that constitute this distinction. Vilayat Khan was a vocalist who wanted to sing on the sitar, and kept working at it all his life with ever growing success. He enabled the experience of sitar music to transcend the limitations of the technology of the instrument, and brought it closer to the acoustic, aesthetic and emotional richness of vocal music.

Vilayat Khan's vocalism shaped every element of his music - the architectural, sculptural, ornamentational, and acoustic. The architecture of Vilayat Khan's rendition of classical music most faithfully and meticulously follows the linear architecture of modern Khayal vocalism. This involves the progressive enhancement of melodic and rhythmic density and complexity without any regression. His choice and sequencing of improvisatory movements in the vilambit as well drut bandishes strictly follows the Khayal protocol, suitably adapted to exploit the distinctive features of the sitar. Vilayat Khan's melodic sculpture swung sharply towards Khayal style phrasing involving melodic continuity over two or more intervallic transitions. This was a major change from the staccato intonation and single-transition phrasing patterns of the traditional sitar idiom.

The influence of vocalism in Vilayat Khan's music was prominent in his alap. He adopted a narrative approach to the alap, inspired by the Merukhand (building-block) system of raga exposition evolved by Kirana gharana maestros. Arvind Parikh has described this feature of the Vilayat Khan alap as a "story-telling intimacy enriched with emotional meaning through variations of volume, timbre and pace." A part of this narrative approach was the subtle use of silences and the use of the Tanpura-substitute (the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th strings) as a filler of silences.

Another prominent facet of vocalism is found in the Ustad's bandish-es (compositions). Although he continued to perform bandish-es in the traditional Masitkhani and Razakhani formats, Vilayat Khan made a radical departure by adapting Khayal and Thumree bandish-es for rendition on the sitar. In a few ragas, he also composed his own Khayal-style bandish-es. His own compositions in the vocalised style were first composed as Khayals, along with the poetic element, perfected as pieces of vocal music, and then adapted for the sitar. He demonstrated this process frequently by singing the bandish-es in concert, along with their sitar adaptations.

An important part of Vilayat Khan's vocalised idiom comes from his photographic memory. He has memorised so many Khayal renditions of the departed masters that echoes of their recordings - firmly etched in the memories of his audiences - are easily discernible in the Ustad's phrasing. His renditions thus acquired a haunting quality that often rendered his admirers sleepless after a concert. This nostalgia triggered off by his renditions became compelling in the Ustad's Thumree-style renditions. His study of the thumree tradition relied largely on his memory of early 20th century recordings. As recently as October 1991, at a concert in Los Angeles, he reproduced an entire Thumree rendering of Zohrabai Agrewali (Paani bhareri in Ghara) from a 78 RPM disc recorded more than half a century ago, accompanying his sitar rendering with his own voice.

In relation to the human voice, a crucial limitation of the sitar is in the communication of emotional values. The human voice communicates them effectively with the aid of variations in volume and timbre. In his attempts at singing on the sitar, Vilayat Khan evolved an entire science of acoustic manipulation of the sitar. The magic of his stroke-craft (right hand) remains the envy of every sitarist who has heard him. He used this magic not only to simulate the vocal expression, but also a variety of special effects - often imitating a Piano, Sarangi, and Shehnai - hitherto not heard on the sitar. A lot of this magic was painstakingly perfected. But, a lot of it was intuitive. I had queried him once on the special effects he had produced on a recording. His answer was: "I don't really know how these are produced. Over the years, I have built up a relationship with my instrument. I visualise the sound I want, and the instrument delivers."

The man-machine relationship

For involuntary processes to have taken charge of the Ustad's music - as they do in vocal music - he would have needed to weld his body and his instrument into a single unified musical machine. This is probably the most fundamental, and least understood, facet of Vilayat Khan's contribution to the art of the sitar. He had probably not reasoned out the precise logic of the ergonomics he evolved. But, it could be inferred from the manner in which he taught Arvind Parikh, whose analysis I present here. Vilayat Khan's basic tenet was that the entire body should be relaxed with the instrument in the sitarist's hand, and every movement should be natural.

The most significant ergonomic contribution of Vilayat Khan was perfecting the posture and the handling of the instrument. Vilayat Khan held the sitar exactly at an angle of 45 degrees to the floor on which the sitarist sits. This was a change from his father, Ustad Enayet Khan's posture, whose angle - judging from his photographs - was between 35 and 40 degrees to the floor. This change delivered an incredible enhancement in mechanical efficiency in bi-directional movement of both the hands - melodic execution as well as stroke-craft.

Vilayat Khan then reasoned that the torso should not have to lean on the right side to hold the tumba (chamber resonator) down. The elbow of the right hand should, therefore, be supported by the tumba of the sitar at a height at which the torso can remain upright. So, he increased the size of the tumba to achieve the desired level of comfort. This change also determined the distance of the sitar from the sitarist's body, and the point at which the stem of the sitar would rest on the right knee of the sitarist to achieve the 45 degrees angle. With this posture and handling, he ensured that the right hand felt no stress in holding down the tumba, and the left hand was not required to hold up the stem. As a result, the power of the forearm and palm muscles of both the hands could be deployed entirely for executing the music.

Vilayat Khan's ergonomic engineering redefined and standardized the grip of the instrument with respect to both hands, the stance of the right-hand palm while implementing the strokes, and the design and placement of the mizrab (wire plectrum) worn on the sitarist's index finger. All these changes had the result of maximizing mechanical efficiency, and control over the musical output, while minimizing stress on the muscles directly engaged in music making. He wanted to do with the sitar what no one before him had attempted, and found a way of making the instrument obey his commands. However for achieving total compliance, he also had to re-engineer the instrument.

Re-engineering the instrument

Executing melody on the sitar is subject to two kinds of melodic discontinuity - that imposed by the frequency of left hand moving between frets, and that imposed by the frequency of sound priming by the right hand. Both these had to be minimized if Vilayat Khan was to simulate the aural experience of vocal music on the sitar. He had to get many more intonations under the impact of each stroke, while also ensuring a much greater sustenance of each intonation. The ratio of melodic density to stroke density had to be tilted sharply in favour of melodic density. In addition, the instrument had to be made capable of delivering a wider range of timbres than had hitherto been possible. A part of the solution to these problems was technique. But, the larger part of it had to be the instrument's ability to support the technique. These were the guiding considerations for Vilayat Khan's re-engineering of the instrument. But, once they were put in motion, a more comprehensive vision of the vocalized aural experience took charge of the process.

For executing the vocalized idiom, Vilayat Khan's first imperative was that the melodic execution should shift predominantly to string-deflection techniques, such as meend, murki and gamak. The Enayet Khan sitar rarely attempted meends of more than two or three tones pulled from the same fret. Complex seven or eight-tone murki-s and heavy gamak-s were absent from the Enayet Khan idiom. If any of these, or even a five-tone meend was attempted on the Enayet Khan sitar, the stress on the instrument would upset the tuning of all the strings. This consideration, and others related to string-deflection, received considerable attention from Vilayat Khan.

The first facet of this was the reinforcement of the instrument for greater stress-tolerance. Vilayat Khan increased the thickness of the tabli (the cover of the tumba), and of the tar-gahan (the channel on top of the instrument which carries the strings to the nuts). He also reinforced the joint between the tumba and the stem with steel bars to enable the instrument to withstand the additional stress of string deflection. The second facet of the re-engineering was enhancing the ability of the instrument to deliver a five-tone string-deflection. The Enayet Khan sitar had a slightly narrower stem, and relatively flat frets, with the strings running close to the surface of the frets. With the enlargement of the tumba by Vilayat Khan, the stem became slightly broader in proportion. But, the frets still did not provide sufficient surface area for a five-tone deflection. So, Vilayat Khan introduced frets of more prominent convexity, and increased the distance between the strings and the frets. These changes helped to create and support an idiom that relied predominantly on string deflection. There was, however, also an acoustic dimension to this. The thickness and metallurgical composition of the frets on the Enayet Khan sitar were not entirely hospitable to a meend-dominant style. So, Vilayat Khan made them thicker, and replaced the brass frets with those of an acoustically superior alloy.

The problem of acoustic sustain led to other changes. The larger tumba provided part of the solution. However, in the sitars of pre-Vilayat Khan design, the acoustic output generated by each stroke was deployed more in generating the volume than sustain. This required a change in design as well as technique. A part of the dissipation of acoustic output was taking place from the upper tumba, which was in use till Enayet Khan's time. In that era, devoid of electronic amplification, the upper tumba provided a useful booster to volume as well as delivery of harmonics. Vilayat Khan dispensed with the contraption, thus allowing the stem to function more efficiently as a column-resonator. His other solutions were at the stroke-production end of the instrument. He perfected fine-tuning the jawari bridge in such a manner that the acoustic output was subdued in volume as well as brightness, but richer in sustain. Along with this, his fine-tuning specifications gave him access to a wider range of timbres. This change also required changes in stroke-craft.

Along with experiments in stroke-craft, Vilayat Khan kept experimenting with different materials for forging the jawari bridge. In the 1970s, he dispensed with the traditional ivory bridge, and the deer-horn (its substitute) of the Enayet Khan era. Thereafter, he experimented with various hard-wood bridges, and even with some space-age polymers. In the last few years, he had settled down to using an ebony bridge, which gave him the best combination of stability and acoustic features. Although he did use the services of expert craftsmen to periodically rework the jawari bridge, he had mastered the technique, and could do it himself.

The distinctive sound of the Vilayat Khan sitar, however, is also the product of more obvious changes - those in the tuning of the strings. Vilayat Khan thus converted the traditional treble-and-bass sitar, modeled after the ancient Rudra Veena, into a pure treble sitar. The traditional sitar had seven strings running over the main bridge, and an effective melodic canvas of three and a half octaves. Vilayat Khan sacrificed one octave, and reduced the number of strings to six. He removed strings representing the lowest octave, and replaced them with strings tuned to the middle with a suitable combination reflecting the tonal geometry of the raga. These strings were not intended for executing melody, but to function as a chord-like filler of silences, over and above the chikari (drone strings) which performed this function partially. Vilayat Khan developed a style of deploying this chord-like device as a suggestion of Tanpura accompaniment. In addition to functioning as a Tanpura replacement, these strings provided a powerful reinforcement of the raga's psycho-acoustic character.

With these structural and tuning changes aimed at executing his vocalized vision of music, Vilayat Khan created an entirely new instrument with a distinctive sound and acoustic ambience. As a result, today, just the opening stroke on a Vilayat Khan style sitar is sufficient to identify a sitarist of the Vilayat Khan style.

The Vilayat Khan legacy

The legacy of a musician consists of his style, and his recordings. Judged on these facets of his legacy, Vilayat Khan ranks amongst the greatest musicians of the 20th century.

Vilayat Khan looms so large over the world of the sitar, that the gharana, named originally after his grandfather, Ustad Imdad Khan, may now legitimately be re-christened the "Vilayat Khani gharana." Today, followers of the Vilayat Khan style amongst sitarists outnumber those of all the remaining gharanas of sitar music. The sitar world is now dominated by the Ustad's brother, sons, nephews and disciples, along with other third generation disciples of his father, Ustad Enayet Khan, and of his uncle, Ustad Waheed Khan. Over and above the descendants and direct disciples of the Imdad Khan lineage, there is a large number of professional sitarists who have studied the Vilayat Khan style, and follow it without having been formally admitted into the gharana. The wave of "Khayal-isation" of instrumental music set in motion by Vilayat Khan has swept all of sitar music, and made significant inroads into the music of all the major instruments. Interestingly, young vocalists are also known to study Vilayat Khan's recordings, especially for his tan-s.

Though a comprehensive discography of the Ustad's published recordings is yet to be compiled, he is estimated to have released between 70 and 100 commercial recordings during his career spanning six decades. The existing archive of concert recordings in possession of his admirers is likely to exceed 400 hours of music. These recordings are amongst the most actively exchanged items in the grey market for live music. Digitally re-mastered versions of many of these recordings will certainly surface in the pre-recorded music market over the next few years. The National Centre for the Performing Arts persuaded the Ustad to do about 30 hours of lecture demonstration on his gharana's music in 1979. By special arrangement, this archive is available to the public for hearing. Although the Ustad stopped performing on All India Radio in 1952, AIR could be in possession of a sizeable Vilayat Khan archive, which could become publicly available one day.

Considering the totality of the Vilayat Khan legacy, his place in the history of music is comparable to the greatest amongst 20th century musicians like Abdul Kareem Khan, Faiyyaz Khan, and Alladiya Khan.

Last bit of Sitar action. What an amazing cover! I saw Vilayat Khan the other day play the concert for Gujarat in London. It was a virtuoso, if incredibly demanding, performance. He's a bit old now in truth.

Originally posted by: adi_0112

Kaash I was free on sunday...koi baat nahi...this will keep me busy for a while now at least...

so what is today?? it is sunday nah.😕

While the Imdadkhani gharana of sitar & surbahar is known after Ustad Imdad Khan, its origin can be traced back to his father, Sahebdad Khan of Etawah, and is, therefore, sometimes known as the Etawah gharana. Sahebdad Khan was the inventor of the surbahar and his forefathers past down their family's music for generations from the 16th century Moghul courts. However, it was Sahebdad's son, Imdad Khan, who came to be known for his innovative sitar and surbahar style which led to the gharana being named after him. Imdad Khan was a court musician at Indore and his two sons, Inayat Khan and Wahid Khan, followed in his footsteps.

In fact, it is Inayat Khan, in particular, who introduced the playing of the khayal gayaki style on the sitar. Inayat Khan was appointed as a musician in the court of the Maharaja of Gauripur, although he was mainly based in Calcutta.


Inayat Khan's sons, Vilayat Khan and Imrat Khan, further polished the vocal style of sitar playing. Moreover, following their father's death, the two brothers also received musical training in khayal on their maternal side from their grandfather, Ustad Bandeh Hassan Khan, uncle Zindeh Hassan Khan, and mother, Bashiran Begum. Imrat in particular received training on the surbahar from his paternal uncle, Ustad Wahid Khan. As a consequence, the family's playing style was strongly influenced by vocal music and this lead to the development and perfection of the khayal gayaki ang.

Ustad Vilayat Khan – The Dazzling Brother

Ustad Vilayat Khan was in thrown into the limelight of India's musical world from the age of 12 when he lost his father Ustad Inayat Khan. In a time when there were very few grand masters of sitar, the country looked to him to carry the torch of his family's musical excellence. Already a talented young prodigy of his father, the young Vilayat was also a child and loved to play truant from his practice. His mother took on the role of disciplinarian and she would actually chain him to a room so he would practice. The strict guidance paid dividends and from his teen years he outshone any other musician of his time. At the age of 15 Vilayat Khan moved to Delhi to earn his living by playing for All India Radio. In Bombay, Ustad Vilayat Khan received rave reviews as a young, brilliant, charismatic, dazzling sitar virtuoso. He became famous for his lightening fast touch on the sitar, dizzying taans and mind blowing jhala. Playing his father's and grandfather's compositions to begin with, he was soon developing classic compositions and an immediately recognisable style of his own.

Under Ustad Vilayat Khan's guidance, Ustad Imrat Khan emerged as a worthy partner and the two of them were able to create musical history on the sitar and surbahar. The lasting contributions made to Indian classical music during this time were the development of the gayaki ang of their gharana and a classic modification of the string setting on the sitar. This setting resulted in such a beautiful sound that other sitarists have followed suit and many sitars today are made with this setting. At about the same time, in the 1950s, Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan emerged as a highly successful duet pairing and the comparative publicity began that would follow them all for the rest of their careers.

Countless Recordings and world famous performances are testimony to the fact that until the time he passed away in 2004, Ustad Vilayat Khan remained the most charismatic and outstanding musician of India.

Originally posted by: Qwest

Ustad Vilayat Khan: The orthodox revolutionary

thanx Babu. i was luking for this article. somehow hve lost it. thanx now i hve it again. worth reading i can say.

World Music Features

Ustad Vilayat Khan By Allan Evans Published October 4, 2005

From the time he began his life as a musician at a maharajah's court, Vilayat Khan has remained synonymous with the sitar, playing throughout the world, recording and imparting his tradition. Ustad (maestro) Khan now lives in a New Jersey townhouse adjacent to a thick sprawl of untouched woodland. His son, the excellent sitarist Hidayat Khan, recalled growing up with their large family on a farm in Dehra Dun: "Social life was constant, with all the family and 15 pupils who lived with us on a farm. I spent my time practicing and riding horses." Today, Vilayat Khan receives visitors in a spacious sunken living room dominated by a photo taken at one of his concerts and, on the opposite wall, a colorized copy of a 90-year-old photo of his father, turbaned, seated cross-legged, bearing with impeccable posture the surbahar, a bass sitar long associated with their family. While the modernity of the concert-hall photo represents Khan's stature and professionalism, it is the family portrait that provides an entry into a lost India, before its independence, when the Khan family was in residence at the court of the Maharaja of Gauripur. One cannot overlook the importance of the rajahs and their enlightened support of music, as many were great connoisseurs who helped the highest forms of art to flourish. Then with independence, all the courts were dissolved and musicians were cast into competition, with the public as their arbiters. With this transformation, many forms of the raga became endangered. Vilayat Khan is an anomaly who has remained untouched by these changes in politics, as his abilities as a child prodigy made for a career that began at the top and has stayed there, unbroken. Unlike his family's patrons, he survived, and has been an active sitarist for nearly 71 years. Twenty years old at the time of independence, Khan's manner and speech evoke the aristocratic elegance of a lost age. "Gauripur court was finished but the association with the maharajah went on for a long time, after independence," he says. "All was nostalgia for olden times, the relation: Often we would go to meet, talk, to remember those days. But the immediate change was so bad, the difference so much, that everything one has to learn goes to business and for advantage. No patronization for culture. India was independent in such a bad condition, bad terms, that if Pakistan can be made, then India and Pakistan have to live separate. The scar remained after the wound, as many times we see the scar, we remember this independence is because of this. Then politically it started getting very bad. More favor to their own people, less favor to other people. My party and your party, as Israel and Palestine." With the partition, Muslim musicians experienced an eclipse, as Khan recounts from deep personal experience. "Culture started getting neglected," he recalls. "The Muslim people started being neglected so much, favoritism came, but they also started neglecting the maharajahs. They confiscated their land and courts, and started showing them the lesser human being. . . So this is the tragedy, especially as we are not talking about any other fine arts: painting, woodwork, gold work, only about music. Music suffered so much that now in India, there are very few people who are connoisseurs of old traditions." Most listeners today first encounter India's sounds through Bollywood, bhangra and other styles. Ustad Khan once contributed to The Music Room, a film by the late auteur Satyajit Ray, which documents the final breath of music at a court. Khan composed and conducted the music, which has been released on CD (Ocora), while in India it has appeared with Ravi Shankar credited as music director, which Khan pessimistically hopes to redress in their hopelessly entangled courts. He too has kept abreast of new music trends: "I don't know why people are crazy to produce loud music. You break your eardrum and such electronic distortion, that is not music." Indicating the portrait nearby, he muses: "My father, I have never found such a great man. Once I was playing very loud and fast and putting only the physical onto the sitar, not emotion, so he came and said 'Wait.' I waited. 'Why you are struggling with sitar? Why you fighting with sitar? Why you are wrestling? Do you want to break it or play it? Look, the silence is also music sometimes.' I often remember that a particular gap from one phrase to start another phrase is so necessary, that gap is the silence, that silence is the music. That gap, for the thinking, that is music." While it is commonplace to dismiss the disdain of an older generation for new music, Khan is an exception, as he was and is a revolutionary. Losing his father at age 10, Khan's instruction continued with the considerable musicians on both sides of his family. Before World War II, sitar playing emphasized rhythmic patterns and repeated instrumental lines. "A thought came into my mind: how to sound more vocal on instrument, this was the basic research," says Khan. "Grandfather singer Bande Hussain Khan (my mother's side), Zindah Hussein Khan, these two people, uncle Wahid, they started teaching me surbahar, sitar, and vocal, then my uncle, Zinda Hussein Khan, he was coaching: don't do this way, do this way, that way. He was singing as I am playing and suddenly a few things he is teaching me I am not able to produce [here, Khan imitates vocal projection from his chest, throat and nose to show varieties of timber]. I thought about what to do about this, the idea started coming to me, how to produce more resonance. That technique I started giving, then changed the string to change more volume, filing the bridge in a way that gives accent, shiny and sharp and soft notes. Then the capacity of pulling the strings more than one or two notes, it was pulling three to four notes, and I made capacity on bridge where it became 5 1/2 notes, then change instrument nearest to voice, thickness and thinness or wood, length. I worked with sitar makers Kanai Lal and Hiren Roy on the thickness and thinness of tabli (upper wood); we chose thun wood. " Khan succeeded in creating a new type of sitar and with it, an expanded technique in the vocal style, and a language that has transformed and furthered five generations of musicians, extending into the work of his own sons. It was unlike anything heard in India's classical music and its impact brought Khan a recognition and prestige as a purist and virtuoso that has accompanied him for over six decades. Despite the passing of time, his quest for perfection is as acute as when he began transforming musical tradition. A profoundly religious and spiritual man, Ustad Khan reflects on the universality underlying his existence: " I am a great believer in God; rather, you may say, a superior power; some friend who is in me and behind my conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind. He 's a very powerful friend, very good advisor, philosopher and guide who always teaches me and always appears as a teacher. He doesn't say yes or no, doesn't come in front of me, even when I have researched so much at practice time, at home. Sometimes when I'm performing, in my improvisation, I do such a miracle thing that immediately after doing that I feel there is definitely some God who has done this today. There is some power, some God who is just now on stage where I am performing. I think, he is playing, I am only a dummy, sitting there, applying my hand on the instrument. Someone else is definitely playing here, just because I have come out of myself, sitting in front of myself, and I am astonished, spellbound. I am hearing so much of my own self, that I have to say, 'It is not me, it is you, you are playing so well, definitely it is not me, it is someone else.'" Vilayat Khan affirms this sense of self-abnegation as key to his musical development. "I always feel like this when I sit alone," he declares. "There is someone who is the better performer than me, some power who I don't see is around us. Perhaps I'm an ignorant or partial man, but I have heard all the instruments in the world, and the sound of the sitar is so Sufi, the sound of sitar is a Sufism." Postscript: Ustad Vilayat Khan passed away in 2004.

Cortesy : http://www.globalrhythm.net

Originally posted by: Barnali

thanx Babu. i was luking for this article. somehow hve lost it. thanx now i hve it again. worth reading i can say.

Barnali Di, Thanks I have few more good articles will do post them later on the day.

Originally posted by: Barnali

so what is today?? it is sunday nah.😕

😆😆😆...For you it is Sunday..for me it is still officially saturday night (technically though now it is almost 1.30 AA, so sunday)..but i guess actual sunday doesn't start until 7- 8 AM...😃