"The greatest musician in the world": Steve Heilig interviews Ali Akbar Khan

Whole Earth, Fall, 2002 by Steve Heilig

AAK: Yes, all the old musicians learned everything by heart, and only the words of songs were written down. There was no written music, but my father, since he had studied Western music, which is written on paper, got the idea to develop notation for Indian music too. He and two other great musicians invented this, writing in various Indian languages.

SH: You never went to any kind of music school or college?

AAK: No. I had no formal training other than by my father and uncle.

SH: Amazing. So how did you become the greatest sarode player in history?

AAK: (Laughing) Actually, my father was the one who decided I should concentrate on sarode. He modified one for me when I was young to make it more versatile, so it could play all sorts of music and musical sounds. Then I did not really need to continue with other instruments anymore.

SH: I have heard from other noted Indian musicians that it is common for aspiring musicians to do a kind of musical retreat--a chilla--where one spends forty days and nights in isolation, doing nothing but playing. Did you ever do that?

AAK: I did not need to. My father made me practice at least twelve hours a day for twenty years.

SH: Following all this training, when did you begin performing in public?

AAK: I began performing sometimes with my father at age 9, at music festivals all over India. I sat behind him and played, and if I made a mistake he would shout at me in front of everyone. Not at other musicians, just me. So there was some pressure to play well! I gave my first solo performance in 1935 when I was 13 years old.

SH: Weren't you already playing with Ravi Shankar--the other Indian musician best known here--at that point?

AAK: Yes, around that time I had heard Ravi Shankar, as he was learning sitar, and I introduced him to the organizers of a festival I played at. We went on to play many duets over the years, and he married my sister.

SH: When did you start recording your playing?

AAK: Recording companies began to start in India in the 1930s, and the first record I did was a 78-rpm disc that could only play for three minutes, so you had to pick short songs! After the long-playing 33-rpm record was introduced, in 1955 I made the first Indian LP ever made in the USA. I was introduced by Yehudi Menuhin, and it was on Angel Records, the classical label.

SH: There was not really any awareness of Indian music here then, or at least not until Ravi Shankar and George Harrison started popularizing it, correct?

AAK: Well, I must say that I started coming to the USA every year from 1955 on, teaching and playing for a couple of months each year. I began teaching and living in California in 1965. George Harrison became Ravi Shankar's student later than that.

SH: And then there was the first kind of explosion of interest in Indian music among the "counterculture." What do you think of that time?

AAK: That there was some real interest was a good thing. But first there were at least five years of wrong ideas, of drugs and incense and funky dress and hippie style, mixed up with the music.