by JON PARELES
Sultan Khan in 2005. PHOTO/Jack Vartoogian/FrontRow
Sultan Khan, a renowned Indian classical musician who carried forward the tradition of a disappearing instrument, the bowed lute called a sarangi, and who performed with Western musicians like George Harrison and Ornette Coleman, died on Nov. 27 in Mumbai, India. He was 71.
The cause was kidney failure, said Zakir Hussain, the tabla player who frequently performed with him.
Mr. Khan, who lived in Jodhpur, was the heir to multiple generations of his family’s style of improvising on the sarangi, translated as the instrument of “a hundred singing colors,” which has three melody strings and 33 sympathetic strings. It is a difficult instrument; instead of choosing notes by pressing down the strings on the neck, as on a violin, the player presses upward with a fingernail. Few classical musicians of Mr. Khan’s generation studied it. But Mr. Khan ensured that the sarangi was heard worldwide and spurred its revival.
Mr. Khan performed and recorded widely in the rigorous North Indian classical tradition, improvising on ragas with songful melodic lines and virtuoso flourishes. He was also a vocalist, and he often interspersed singing and playing.
“It is thought among musicians in India that his sarangi literally sang,” Mr. Hussain said by telephone from Mumbai. “He was able to coax out of the instrument all the nuances of the vocal style of Indian music.”
Along with classical performances, Mr. Khan was employed in many other spheres. He worked on Bollywood musical soundtracks and had a latter-day pop career in India as a singer. He performed or recorded with Western pop and rock musicians including Madonna and Duran Duran, jazz musicians like the saxophonist Dave Liebman, and with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Pakistani qawwali singer.
The New York Times for more
Listen Ustad Sultan Khan & Ustad Zakir Hussain. Magic of Sarangi.
Listen Ustad Sultan Khan & Rekha Bhardwaj
(Thanks to Robin Khundkar, his regret: “My regret is I never got to see him perform live.”)