Thirty-seven years ago I embarked on a life-altering musical and spiritual odyssey with the great maestro, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan.
The beginning of this journey was a clearly defined moment, filled with astonishment and inspiration. His death on June 18 2009 was quite another kind of moment — one that shocked and saddened the entire music world. Now the odyssey will go on, perhaps without his physical presence, but certainly with all the precious lessons, experiences and memories that have accumulated during all these years.
I am flooded by recollections of the time I spent with Khansahib, (a title by which he is known to his students) from the first moment I saw him perform in 1971, when I was a teenager, to the last incredibly poignant lesson he gave us only hours before he died. I was just one of many curious Westerners who, somewhat by accident, were put in contact with his music. But at one moment during that first concert it was as if a bolt of lightning hit me with the power of the music — so deep, so compelling, and so spontaneous. I had to find out where this came from. I made the pilgrimage to California and as soon as I began studying I knew that this was the music I had been searching for my whole life.
My expectation of the Ali Akbar College was that it would be some kind of holy place like an ashram. But what I first encountered was Khansahib, dressed in a Western flannel shirt and smoking a cigarette, teaching a large ensemble of singers and instrumentalists. It was surreal, and the melody, which he was in the process of composing, had the same beauty and hypnotic power as the music I had heard during that first concert.
Getting close to the master
I registered for the summer session of 1972, grabbed a sitar and sat myself down as close as I could get to the master. The sitting position began to hurt after 10 minutes and the pain was excruciating during the first half of the two-hour class. But I was too afraid to move an inch in front of him. Then I lost all sensation in my legs and by the end of the class I could hardly stand up.
In time it got better — and then it got worse. As soon as I began to get more accustomed to the sitting position, my fingers started hurting (and sometimes bleeding), from the thin steel strings cutting into them. The wire plectrum would dig into my right index finger — it was torture. But seeing Khansahib playing was captivating and I was tempted to switch from the sitar to the sarod. But I hesitated — what a shame after a whole year of study to have to go all the way back to the beginning. (Little did I suspect that, in fact, I was still at the very beginning.)
Then one night I had a dream in which Khansahib said to me: “What are you waiting for? Just start playing sarod.” I did so the very next day.
In 1985, after seeing the growing interest in Indian music in Switzerland, Khansahib recommended that I open a branch of the Ali Akbar College in Basel.
In December, just after the birth of my first daughter, he arrived for the first of what would turn out to be many memorable seminars and European concert tours. But there were some growing pains and I made some mistakes. One evening Khansahib was so upset that he spent several hours lambasting me. He even constructed a “composition” with the musicality of one of his performances. The main theme was “But Ken, how could you do this to me?” After each variation he would elaborate how I had messed things up, then he would come back to the main theme: “But Ken, how could you …”
I broke down in tears. Then, almost as though he was waiting for that breaking point, he said: “I am doing this because I love you and I want you to grow.” I understood that he was inviting me to change my entire view of the world. I slowly realised that Khansahib was demanding that I perceive something more subtle than just his words, to hear more of the microtones in between the notes and to sense the rhythms that are hidden in the shadows of the beats. From then on everything was different and I felt closer than ever to him and his teaching.
I remember his words, which have always been so inspiring to all of his students and disciples, and which now take on an even more challenging meaning: “I want to keep alive what my father learned; I don’t want it to die. It must be spread all over the world.” What better way to thank Khansahib than to pass what we were able to learn on to others. And so the odyssey will go on.
Ken Zuckerman has been a disciple of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan since 1972. He lives in Switzerland where he directs the Ali Akbar College of Music in Basel. He is also a professor at the Music Conservatory of Basel, where he gives courses in North Indian classical music and Western music from the Middle Ages