Like chicken tikka, the sarod is a sublime
product of the Moghul influence in India. Simon Broughton
learns the secrets of the instrument from its leading contemporary
virtuoso, Amjad Ali Khan
I first encountered it at the BBC Proms in
the Royal Albert Hall in 1994 when a sarod recital at 2am
was the finale of a late night concert of Indian music. It
was a revelation –Amjad Ali Khan, distinguished and
silver-haired, leading a refined journey into musical equivalents
of the Taj Mahal, Moghul palaces and hilltop fortresses. Elegance
and refinement, supported by a cohesive structure and deep
foundations.
The
sarod is much smaller than the sitar. It sits
comfortably in the player’s lap and is leaner
and cleaner in sound, without that predominant
jangling of sympathetic strings. The sarod has
resonant sympathetic strings, but they are fewer
and far less prominent in the soundscape. Still,
it’s no less demanding to play. “People
like to talk about the king
or prince of sarod, but actually I’m the
slave of sarod,”
laughs Amjad Ali Khan acknowledging how hard it
is to master, yet also confident that no one is
likely to outshine him. “I
am devoted to it and I always want to try and
find out what it wants to say.” |
Amjad Ali Khan, born in Gwalior (Madhya Pradesh) in 1945, is the sixth-generation
sarod player in his family and his ancestors have developed and shaped the instrument
over several hundred years. “You could say it’s my family instrument”,
he says with justifiable pride. “Whoever is playing the sarod today learned
directly or indirectly from my forefathers.” |
The singing sarod
The instrument speaks eloquently of the close connections between India and Afghanistan
and the Persian world. Architecture, food and music are amongst
the great hybrids born of the Islamic invasion of northern India through Afghanistan.
The sound of the sarod as we know it today is distinctly Indian
in character, but it links to the sinewy, muscular style |
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of
the Afghan rabab - a wooden Central Asian lute,
covered with skin. For Amjad Ali Khan it’s
the tone quality that’s the attraction:
“The skin makes the sound very human -
it’s not wooden. It has flexibility, sensitivity
and depth.” The sound of the sarod is
dominated by the singing, vocal tone of its
melodic strings. Many instrumentalists -
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including
violinists, clarinettists, sarangi and
sitar players - like to compare the |
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sound
of their instruments to the human voice.
And sarod players are no |
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exception. “I actually spend as much time
singing as playing,” admits Amjad Ali Khan and through his father he learned
about applying the vocal traditions of dhrupad and khayal to his instrument. |
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| “I am singing through my instrument,”
he says. One of the principal modifications of the sarod
from the Afghan rabab is its long metal fingerboard,
which allows swooping melismatic slides between the
melody notes. This is something you can’t do on
fretted instruments. |
This is a big advantage of the sarod over the sitar”,
he explains. “On the sitar you have to pull the string sideways to create
the slides. And you can’t pull that far - not more than 3 or 4 notes. But
on the sarod you can slide over 7 notes or more, skating up the fingerboard.”
As well as this lyrical, vocal style, Amjad Ali Khan is renowned for his fast
staccato passages up and down the instrument - something he has made very much
his own. This is the latest addition to a long tradition of sarod playing and
Amjad Ali Kahn’s two sons, Amaan Ali Khan and Ayaan Ali Khan, are
now taking it forward to the next generation. As with the Griots of West Africa,
lineage and family are hugely important in Indian music. You wonder what would
have happened had one of Amjad Ali Khan’s sons said they were more interested
in the electronic keyboard, or accountancy!
The Sarod Lineage
It was Amjad Ali Khan’s great great great grandfather Mohammad Hashmi Khan
Bangash, a musician and horsetrader, who came to India with the Afghan rabab in
the mid-1700s and became a court musician to the Maharajah of Rewa (Madhya Pradesh).
It was his descendants, and notably his grandson Ghulam Ali Khan Bangash who became
a court musician in Gwalior, who gradually transformed the rabab into the sarod
we know today. The predominantly staccato sound of the rabab was developed into
a more lyrical sound with notes that sustained and one of the major instruments
of Indian classical music was born. The name sarod comes from the Persian sarood
meaning ‘melody’, alluding to its more melodic tone.
Both Ghulam Ali Khan Bangash and his grandson Haafiz
Ali Khan received musical tuition from descendants or followers of
Miyan Tansen (c1520-1590), one of India’s most celebrated singers and court
musician to the great Moghul emperor Akbar, which increases the musical currency
of the family no end. The family stayed in Gwalior, Tansen’s city, and no
doubt were regular visitors to the holy tamarind tree by Tansen’s tomb said
to convey special musical powers. Their musical heritage combines their own school
of sarod playing (the Bangash gharana) with the tradition of instrumental music
from Tansen (the Senia gharana).
Haafiz Ali Khan - grandson of Ghulam Ali Khan Bangash and father
of Amjad Ali Khan
– was a very highly respected sarod player and was a court musician in Gwalior
up until Independence in 1947. He regularly played for the Maharaja, although
Amjad Ali Khan suggests that playing on the whim of a patron who didn’t
have a great knowledge or love of music wasn’t an enviable role. Certainly,
if you visit the Jai Vilas Palace in Gwalior, the Maharaja’s family home,
the over-the-top furnishings, cut-glass Venetian crystal swing and love of Italian
Baroque don’t give the impression of a family hugely enamoured of refined
sarod music. By contrast, you can also visit the family house where Amjad Ali
Khan was born, which he has converted into Sarod Ghar (the ‘Home of the
Sarod’) a teaching centre and museum of his family and the sarod, with an
impressive collection of instruments including his ancestor’s rababs. Gwalior
is actually one of the musical centres of North India. Famous as the home of Tansen,
the traditions of dhrupad and khayal music as well as the sarod and there’s
an annual music festival in Tansen’s honour. It’s certainly no exaggeration
to see Gwalior as an Indian equivalent of Vienna in terms of European music. Indeed
Amjad Ali Khan admits that it was visiting Beethoven’s house in Bonn that
inspired him to create his Sarod Ghar in Gwalior.
Wood, skin and
steel
Some sarods, like the Afghan rabab, are made from mulberry
wood, but most are made, like the sitar, from teak. According
to Amjad Ali Khan, teak gives a fuller, richer sound. The
front of the wooden belly is covered with goat skin. The best
place to get goat skins is Calcutta and that’s where
most of the sarod makers are based, including Hemendra Chandra
Sen, of Hemen & Sons, who is around 80 years old and the
most important sarod maker in India. “In Bengal,”
explains Amjad Ali Khan, “there is a strong cult of
Kali worship and there are lots of sacrifices to her. There
are lots of goat skins in Calcutta and that’s why you
find most of the tabla makers there too. This is the character
of India and its history.
A Hindu woman wears a beautiful Sari made by Muslims in Varanasi.
I myself am a Muslim, but I play an instrument made in Calcutta
by a Hindu. We all have different religions, but we depend
on each other. The history of India is like that.”
It was Amjad Ali Khan’s forefathers that effected the
most important development in the instrument and replaced the wooden, fretted
neck of the rabab with a smooth polished-steel fingerboard which permits the characteristic
slides (or meend) which are used extensively at the beginning of a composition
to establish the raga. Just as a tabla player will always have his bottle of talcum
powder to sprinkle on his drums, Amjad Ali Khan has a small, decorated box of
palm oil to help his left had slide effortlessly around the fingerboard. The rabab’s
gut strings have also been replaced by steel ones – piano strings in fact
– which give a much more ringing, and singing tone. There are just four
strings used for playing the melody, two drone strings and two chikari strings
(raised drone strings which are used to punctuate the melodic phrases with rhythmic
accompaniment). Amjad Ali Khan uses 11 sympathetic strings (tuned to the notes
of the raga), although other players use more which increases the reverberant
effect. The four melody strings are generally tuned (from the top) doh, fa, doh,
mi. The lowest string is made from bronze and has a deep, powerful sound, “full
of passion”.
The strings are not plucked with the fingers,
but with a java or coconut-shell plectrum. “This plectrum
can be a hammer or a feather,” says Amjad Ali Khan.
“You can play very loud, or give
it just a feather touch, skimming gently across the strings.”
Actually, the range of colours that a player like Amjad Ali
Khan can get out of the instrument is quite incredible and
is certainly why it’s found such an important role in
classical Indian instrumental music.
Nail-biting technique
Like many musicians who play an instrument that’s been
‘elevated’ from folk to classical status, Amjad
Ali Khan can talk quite dismissively of the rabab. “It’s
not a very expressive instrument,” he says, “and
quite limited.” Using the soft tips of his fingers,
he imitates the duller, more gutty sound of the rabab and
contrasts it with the clear, ringing tone of the sarod. There
are actually two schools of sarod playing – one in which
the strings are stopped by the fingertips and the other in
which the strings are stopped by the finger-nails of the left
hand (as practised by Amjad Ali Khan). This is what makes
the clear ringing sound and is one of the things that makes
it so difficult to play. “These two nails I never cut,”
says Amjad Ali Khan, showing the first and second fingers
of his left hand. “They just get worn down. I have to
file them after every concert. People might think I am just
beautifying my nails, but it’s essential maintenance.
They get little grooves cut into them from the strings.”
I get a vivid picture in my mind of the ridges worn into wells
in India by the continuous pulling of ropes. It is nails on
steel that gives the sarod its clear, muscular sound. “In
Hindi we say ‘Swara hi ishwar
hay’ - ‘Sound is
god’ and whilst you are playing you can feel
god. I often have my eyes closed to feel the sound.”
Amjad Ali Khan shows how he can play melodies
just using his left hand. “My
father used to play like that for five minutes at a time,”
he says. “Many years ago, a sarangi player at the court
challenged my grandfather. ‘You
must play anything that I can play’, he said.
My grandfather took up the challenge and copied everything
the sarangi player could bow on his instrument. Then my grandfather
said: ‘Now you see if you can
imitate me’ and asked the sarangi player to tie-up
his right hand. My grandfather played beautiful melodies with
one hand, but the sarangi player could do nothing without
his bowing hand and lost.”
For Amjad Ali Khan the sarod is more than
an instrument. He is more than a slave and it is more than
a master. It is a friend and spiritual companion: “The
sarod should have human expression. The sarod should sing,
should yell, laugh, cry - all the emotions. Music has no religion
in the same way flowers have no religion. Through music –
and through this instrument - I feel connected with every
religion and every human being – or every soul, I should
say.”
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