Indian Classical Music
The burgeoning of India’s indie music scene often leads many of us, especially milennials to
cultivate an interest in the music that defined this country’s soundscape. Anyone committed to
exploring great music in India can hardly do without perusing the classical archives. If you’re not
listening to the men and women that gave this country its roots in music, you are missing out on
sounds that evoke impossibly timeless sentiment. And, if you want to remedy that, you should be
youtubing the following five names at the speed of light.
USTAD ALI AKBAR KHAN ANNAPURNA DEVI
We begin with the obvious name, one that has
manipulated the strings of the sarod in order to send
multitudes into ecstasy. A virtuoso of the Maihar
gharana, he was trained by his father, the legendary
Ustad Alauddin Khan. He composed numerous ragas
and cinematic soundtracks, chief among them being
Satyajit Ray's Devi and Tapan Sinha's Khudito Pashan
and part of the music for Bernardo Bertolucci's Little
Buddha. Having visited America on the invitation of
violinist Yehudi Menhuin, he performed abundantly in
the West, attracting the adulation of George Harrison,
Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr, among others.
The ustad established a music school in Calcutta in 1956,
and the Ali Akbar College of Music in 1967, which is
now based in San Rafael, California. Emerging from the same hallowed bloodline as Ustad
Alauddin Khan and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Annapurna
Devi was acclaimed for her mastery over the surbahar
( bass sitar ) to the extent that she counted among
her disciples Pandit Nikhil Banerjee and Hariprasad
Chaurasia. Although she never quite adopted music as
a profession in the way of her father ( Ustad Alauddin
Khan) , brother ( Ustad Ali Akbar Khan ) or husband
( Pandit Ravi Shankar ), she was lauded with wide
audiences and multiple awards. A recluse who recorded
no albums and refused to perform in public after her
divorce, she is still celebrated as one of the most adept
instrumentalists of all time.
To start off on his work, I’d suggest liberal helpings of
Raga Chandranandan, a composition he shaped on four
evening ragas, Malkauns, Chandrakauns, Nandakauns
and Kaushi Kanada .
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The
Score Magazine
www.thescoremagazine.com
While obtaining a adequately audible recording of
her pieces is difficult on the internet, it is entirely
worth listening to a low quality track of her Raag Manj
Khamaj .