The first thing that strikes the viewer in the video of the song ‘Akash’ by Sarodist Alam Khan is the awestruck look on the face of the protagonist—a school-going child. As the student wanders the streets of Mumbai under a vast, open sky, one can see the joy brought forth by seemingly mundane acts like riding in auto rickshaws and local trains.
“Everything is fresh, beautiful and filled with possibility, as we are all one people under the sky through a child’s eyes,” says the musician, inadvertently also summarising the appeal of his own peculiar brand of music.
Alam has a legacy to live up to—of his father, the late sarod maestro Ali Akbar Khan, from whom he was trained as a torchbearer of the Maihar Gharana.
The musician, however, is also deeply influenced by a modern global sound having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, US, and practised his craft around the world.
It is the artful blend of these distinctive musical styles that stands out in his recently released album, Mantram, produced by the label Snakes x Ladders, as a tribute to his father on his centennial
birth year.
Alam continues to push the envelope of sarod-playing as it is understood in the backdrop of traditional Hindustani classical training.
He shares, “A great part of my life is not only rooted but exists entirely in the tradition I come from. Hence, even to create contemporary music, I feel one must know tradition first. Then one can stretch, bend and go beyond it. My genre is a mix of Hindustani classical, contemporary classical, contemporary instrumental, experimental and global. There are probably other boxes for it to be classified in too. The bottom line is, I don’t like my music to be boxed.”
Mantram is an example of this defiance of sticking to a genre. It consists of eight tracks based on ragas, yet is a departure from the classical genre. The music was originally composed for a contemporary Kathak dance production performed by the Chitresh Das Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Alam pictured the visual elements of the dance and created cinematic soundscapes to complement it. But the music had been envisioned as a standalone album right from the start.
Other musicians who have contributed to the album are Sultan Khan, Sabir Khan and Aditya Prakash. Alam also attributes the richness of the compositions to the other artists on the album—Jay Gandhi, Tommy Cappel and Nilan Chaudhuri. While most musicians shy away from creating entire albums in this age of quick content, the 40-year-old deliberately chose this long format.
He says, “Some works deserve more time to tell a story. The singles and EP trend is not always conducive to creation. I like to tell stories through my music, which gradually unfolds through the course of an album. Most songs in it act as standalone singles too.”
Next on the cards is a release melding Indian classical instruments and a Western classical string quartet together. Play on, maestro.