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The Arts

Play it again, Irshad

Firdaus Ali

Watching sitar player Irshad Khan play is to experience a brilliant flight of fingers and feelings.

Playing scintillating tunes to packed audiences at various music and culture festivals in Toronto, Khan does what he's best at -- romancing the sitar.

Joined sometimes by Western instrumentalists like Rick Lazar and Ron Allen, he holds audiences spellbound with soulful melodies while his fingers work magic on the instrument. Vibrant sounds emanate from the music virtuoso as he does a normal round of riyaaz accompanied by a tabla player and a guitarist a few minutes before one such recital.

"Music is a family heirloom spanning 400 years," says Khan, who belongs to the eighth generation of the Imdad Khani gharana, the same that enthralled music lovers in the Mughal courts of Emperor Akbar.

His father Ustad Imrat Khan and uncle Ustad Vilayat Khan are both legends who need no introduction to music lovers. His great-grandfather Ustad Sahabdad Khan created the surbahar, a bass version of the sitar. Unlike the sitar, it is a huge instrument and perhaps one of the most difficult stringed instruments, requiring great technical skill.

"Coming from a family of maestros, expectations run high and sometimes it is difficult to live up to them," admits Khan. "I play the sitar in the vocal style, combining classical music with folk tunes to give it a different sound. Occasionally I resort to pulsating fusion music to draw the crowds in."

Once they are drawn in, he takes them on a mystical musical journey starting with the seven notes, spanning several khayals, alaps and raags along the way and ending in nirvana.

Few know Irshad Khan is also a vocalist and surbahar player in his own right. He took to the sitar when he was two and rendered his first public performance at the age of seven. Born in Calcutta, he won the child prodigy award and made his international debut at 13, performing at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.

In 1981,he became the youngest musician to perform at the Royal Albert Hall, and at 18 rewrote history by becoming the youngest soloist to perform at the first Indian All Night Concert at the PROMS, an international music festival held in London. Since then he has won many awards, gold medals and 'wah-wahs' and performs extensively for music festivals and universities across the globe.

Though, he sticks to the conventional classical form of music, Irshad Khan's occasional experiments with variations in styles and genres have been quite successful. Dabbling in a bit of Jazz and the Blues at times creates a heady mix that keeps him off the beaten track. He blends Eastern and Western tunes, managing to create a fusion of sorts.

"Fusion is good as long as it doesn't become confusion," he quips, having yet again experimented with style and variation in rhythmic sounds in his forthcoming music album Awakenings. The album, as the name suggests, is food for the soul and one of the easiest ways to nirvana.

In Awakenings, Khan blends the sitar with other percussion instruments like the double bass, violin and drums to give traditional music a different feel. "It's a whole range of different sounds that will intrigue music lovers," he says.

Khan's earlier album, Romancing the Sitar, was a big hit with music aficionados the world over. Incidentally, his is the only family to have four generations of recorded music on disc, which is of archival value and can prove an excellent learning tool for the new generation.

"There is a need to uphold the music tradition both in the East as well as the West," says Khan. For this reason he has one leg in Canada and the other in India. He spends the summer months in Canada, teaching students music at the Universal Academy for Musicians, Toronto. His winters are spent in India, where he performs, teaches and plays.

"There is a lot of fake music being sold in the garb of good music and one must beware of these. As a music lover, I take it upon myself to educate and teach people music so that they can know the difference," says Khan. "I believe in passing down what I have learnt and practised."

All we can say to that is, "Irshad!"

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