bookofjoe

Ali Akbar Khan, 'The greatest musician in the world,' is dead at 87

Wrote Robert E. Thomason in his obituary in today's Washington Post, "The late American violinist Yehudi Menuhin... said he considered Mr. Khan 'an absolute genius, the greatest musician in the world.'"

Here's the obituary.

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Bengali Musician Was 'An Absolute Genius'

Ali Akbar Khan, 87, a Bengali musician who was regarded as one of the finest artists of Indian classical music who helped popularize the genre in the West through appearances on television, record and stage, died June 18 at his home in San Anselmo, Calif., of a kidney ailment.

The son of a revered musician and teacher, Mr. Khan began intensive training as a child and partnered with sitar player Ravi Shankar -- his future brother-in-law -- performing duets throughout India.

Mr. Khan was a virtuoso of the sarod, a 25-string instrument in the lute family. His chosen musical genre is based in part on the concept of the raga, which consists of improvised music based on a variety of scales. From these scales, or permutations of them, Indian musicians follow traditional forms but add their own inflections and feeling.

The late American violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who became one of his earliest champions in the West, said he considered Mr. Khan "an absolute genius, the greatest musician in the world."

Mr. Khan was appointed court musician to the maharaja of Jodhpur in 1943, and his international career launched under Menuhin, who organized a showcase of Indian music at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1955 and featured the sarodist.

About that time, Angel Records released Mr. Khan's first Western recordings of Indian music. His appearance on broadcaster Alistair Cooke's network television program "Omnibus" marked one of the first times Indian classical music was performed live on Western television.

"When I came in '55, because I was in Indian dress, people on the street in New York came out of the bars and shops and followed us," Mr. Khan told the publication Asian Week. "They asked me, 'Who are you? Where are you from?' When I said, 'India,' some of them didn't even know where it was. Or others who knew I was a musician asked funny questions like, 'How can you play music in India with all the tigers and snakes and monkeys you have to fight off?' "

As Indian culture and music began to infuse Western pop culture in the 1960s, widespread interest in musicians such as Mr. Khan grew. In 1967, he established the Ali Akbar College of Music in Berkeley, Calif., which he later moved to Marin County, north of San Francisco. He taught there while maintaining a schedule of performances and recordings such as "Shree Rag" and "Misra Piloo," both of which brought him critical acclaim.

In 1971, a civil war transformed Mr. Khan's homeland, called East Pakistan at the time, into the independent country of Bangladesh. The war created an immense humanitarian crisis among the already poor population. Former Beatles guitarist George Harrison, a student and performer of Indian music, assembled a number of musicians for a relief benefit concert held at New York's Madison Square Garden.

Mr. Khan and Shankar, whose divorce from Mr. Khan's sister strained their relationship, performed at the Concert for Bangladesh with musicians including Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr. An album and film of the concert were later released.

In an interview many years later, Mr. Khan said he had bad memories of the Madison Square Garden event. "That was not music but I'd say a war of music," he told Reuters in 2007, adding at one point he stuffed toilet paper in his ears to block out the noise.

Mr. Khan was born April 14, 1922, in British-controlled East Bengal, now Bangladesh. His family claimed a musical lineage that stretched back to a 16th-century court musician of the Mogul Emperor Akbar.

His father, Allauddin Khan, was regarded as one of the foremost Indian musicians of his time and had reportedly mastered more than 200 instruments. He said his father, who lived to be more than 100 and also taught Shankar, was "very strict. He never played with me, he never laughed, never smiled. He was a tiger. I wanted love from him. . . . The motive was that if you show that, too much love, then I was spoiled. At that time I was very angry, but now I am grateful."

The younger Khan debuted publicly at 13 and as a young man earned the designation "ustad," or master musician. He went on to compose his own ragas, a striking accomplishment because ragas are typically handed down by tradition. Over the years, Mr. Khan also composed scores for Indian films such as Satyajit Ray's "Devi" (1960) and the early Merchant-Ivory collaboration "The Householder" (1963).

Survivors include his wife, Mary, and 11 children from several previous wives. He said that in writing his family history, he surprised Mary when he admitted to a marriage that lasted a day. He called it "an accident. I didn't like the lady at all."

In 1991, Mr. Khan received a MacArthur Fellowship, widely known as the "genius" grant. He later received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

He once wrote of the sarod, "If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist -- then you may please even God."

Lock & Load: World's most technical salad tongs

Florence Fabricant reviewed them in her June 16, 2009 "Food Stuff" column in the New York Times Dining section, as follows.

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Love This Salad, but Your Tongs Make Me a Little Nervous

How many bells and whistles do you need on a pair of stainless steel kitchen tongs? The business end of these has three different surfaces: one wavy for gentle pickup, one with a sawtooth edge for secure grasping and at the tip, a fine little angled edge that works for small items.

Each pair can be locked into three positions by adjusting the top eyelet, and they come apart for cleaning by hand or in the dishwasher.

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9" long: $19.95.

12" long: $24.95.

Both here.

bookofjoe MoneyMaker™ — 'Because nothing digital ever disappears'

Kevin Kelly made an observation more or less to that effect which I read somewhere in recent months, the precise source of which eludes me at the moment.

Note to self: email him and ask.

Anyhow, I got to thinking last evening about yesterday's isthisyourluggage.com post and the seven pieces of lost luggage featured there, along with their contents.

Consider that every carry-on bag is X-rayed, and more and more checked bags as well.

Well?

Those images are in there somewhere.

Oh, sure, if you ask you'll be told they're erased after a given period of time.

Perhaps.

But I'd put money on their being accessible if someone really wanted to look.

So here's the MoneyMaker™: Scale up Luna Laboo's idea and post the X-rays of all lost bags on a dedicated Website.

Charge a fee for each one returned and Bob's your uncle.

Yes, Kevin — I'll give you half of whatever I make from this one.

Infinity Bench

Designed by Paris-based architect Carl Fredrik Svenstedt.

Evenly spaced rings of furniture-grade plywood in the shape of a wave.

$3,790.

[New York] Times Wire: The Gray Lady dances... the Macarena?

Long story short: It's a semi-live feed from the Times' writers, editors and photographers, updated about every 10-15 minutes around the clock.

AirCurve iPhone Acoustic Amplifier

"The AirCurve looks like a simple, elegantly minimal stand for your iPhone. But inside is a coiled waveguide 'horn' that collects the sound from the built-in speaker of your iPhone, amplifies it (by about 10 decibels), and projects it into the room."

Requires no power or batteries.

$17.99.

Best cartoon of the month

 

By George Booth.

Beverage Buddy

Can your pink flamingo do that?

Didn't think so.

2 for $15.99.