Ali Akbar Khan, after years of rigorous training, gave his debut performance at a music conference
in Allahabad in 1936, at the age of 13. Three years later, in December 1939, he accompanied Ravi
Shankar on the sarod during the latter's debut performance at the same conference; this was the
first of many jugalbandis (duets) between the two musicians. In 1938 Khan gave his first recital
on All India Radio (AIR), Bombay (accompanied on the tabla by Alla Rakha), and starting in January
1940, he gave monthly performances on AIR, Lucknow. Finally in 1944, both Shankar and Khan left
Maihar to start their professional careers as musicians; Shankar went to Bombay, while Khan
became the youngest Music Director for AIR, Lucknow, and was responsible for solo performances
and composing for the radio orchestra.[7]
In 1943, on his father's recommendation, Khan was appointed a court musician for the Maharaja of
Jodhpur, Hanwant Singh.[10] There, he taught and composed music besides giving recitals and was
accorded the title of Ustad by the Maharaja. When the princely states were wound down with India's
independence in 1947 and Hanwant Singh died in a plane crash in 1948, Khan moved to Bombay.[7]
In Bombay, he won acclaim as a composer of several film scores, including Chetan
Anand's Aandhiyan (1952). Lata Mangeshkar sang the title song, "Har Kahin Pe Shaadmani" and as
a token of her respect to sarod maestro, did not charge any fee.[11] This was followed by Satyajit
Ray's Devi (1960), Merchant-Ivory's The Householder, and Tapan Sinha's Khudito Pashan ("Hungry
Stones", 1960), for which he won the "Best Musician of the Year" award. He also played Sarod for a
song in 1955 film Seema which had the music composed by Shankar Jaikishan. Later in 1993, he
would score some of the music for Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha.[12]
Beginning in 1945, Khan also started recording a series of 78 rpm disks (which could record about
three minutes of music) at the HMV Studios in Bombay. For one such record he conceived a new
composition Raga Chandranandan ("moonstruck"), based on four evening
ragas, Malkauns, Chandrakauns, Nandakauns and Kaushi Kanada. This record was a huge success
in India, and the raga found a worldwide audience when a 22-minute rendition was re-recorded for
the Master Musician of India LP in 1965 − one of Khan's seminal recordings.[13]
He performed in India and traveled extensively in the West. In 1956, Khan founded the Ali Akbar
College of Music in Calcutta, with the mission to teach and spread Indian classical music. He
founded another school of the same name in Berkeley, California in 1967 and later moved it to San
Rafael, California.[10] Khan performed in Boston with Shankar Ghosh in 1969 for the Peabody Mason
Concert series. In 1985 he founded another branch of the Ali Akbar College of Music in Basel,
Switzerland. Khan was the first Indian musician to record an LP album of Indian classical music in
the United States and to play sarod on American television.[14]
Khan has participated in a number of classic jugalbandi pairings, most notably with Ravi
Shankar, Nikhil Banerjee and violinist L. Subramaniam. A few recordings of duets with Vilayat
Khan also exist. He also collaborated with Western musicians. In August 1971, Khan performed
at Madison Square Garden for the Concert for Bangladesh, along with Ravi Shankar, Alla Rakha
and Kamala Chakravarty; other musicians at the concert included George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Eric
Clapton and Ringo Starr. A live album and a movie of the event were later released.[1][10]
Khan was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1967[16] and the Padma Vibhushan in 1989,[17] among
other awards. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1991,[10] the first Indian musician to receive the
so-called "genius grant".[15] In 1997, Khan received the National Endowment for the Arts'
prestigious National Heritage Fellowship, the United States' highest honour in the traditional
arts.[18] Khan received five Grammy nominations over the course of his life.[15]
