Mushtaq Ali Khan

Mushtaq Ali Khan (20 June 1911 in Banaras – 21 July 1989) and was an Indian sitar, surbahar (and pakhawaj) player. His father Ashiq Ali Khan was a renowned sitar player. His musical ancestor tree includes Masit Sen, the originator of Masitkhani Baaj (a slow tempo instrumental composition). He was recognised as the foremost representative of the Senia gharana (style, musical school) of sitar playing in the mid-20th century.

At first a court musician at Jaunpur, he left the court to pursue an independent career. He started playing for All India Radio in 1929, and performed at the 1931 Sangeet Sammelan (conference) in Allahabad. For all of the 1940s and most of the 1950s he was considered the most prominent sitar player in India, following the demise of Enayat Khan of the Etawah Gharana, and prior to the rise of the young Ravi Shankar and Vilayat Khan in the mid-1950s. In 1968 he won the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, highest Indian recognition given to practising artists, given by Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy of Music, Dance & Drama.

Being a purist, Khan-Saheb refused to yield to shifting popular tastes and to adopt the innovations introduced by Ravi Shankar on one hand and Vilayat Khan on the other, which led to a gradual decline in his popularity. At the time of his death he was known as a "musicians' musician". Many of India's best known musicians expressed their appreciation of the purity of his style and musicality in a book published in Delhi after his death

Khan started his instruction at the age of 6. He learned from his father, Ashiq Ali Khan, who had learned sitar from the renowned 19th century player Barkatullah Khan, a descendant of Masit Sen of Delhi, the inventor of the Masitkhani gat (the major style of slow musical composition in sitar playing) His name became synonymous with the Senia style although he may actually have practised an even more austere style than his predecessors in the gharana. He eschewed much of the ornamentation of modern sitar technique (such as murkhi and zamzama), and embraced a clean, pure sound. His alap was constructed along the lines of a dhrupad alap, and his jod and jhalla derived a lot from been (rudra vina) technique. Oddly enough, in spite of being a musical descendant of Masit Sen, he rarely played Masitkhani gats in public, and none of the commercially available examples of his music includes one. He opted to play the faster Rezakhani gats instead, feeling that playing Masitkhani gats to an undiscerning audience would cause them to be devalued.

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