The beauty in diversity

Hidayat Husain Khan

What if I told you that you were ugly? Without having met you, or known you, I look at your picture and tell you that you're ugly," questions Hidayat Husain Khan, attempting to make a case for himself by mimicking the reckless attitude of critics and trolls, who have only been encouraged by the freedom afforded by social media. Although he is expected to brave opinions about his craft from individuals who may have no knowledge about it, Khan admits that from a young age, he didn't win favour for his choices.

"My dad was a purist, in an abstract sense," he says of his legendary father, Ustad Vilayat Khan. "He encouraged [me] to listen to all kinds of music, but believed one must take those influences and put them into their own music, instead of diluting [a genre] by fusing the two. He was not pro-fusion, but encouraged us to be thinkers."

Khan evidently had none of it. He worked on enhancing his craft as a sitarist with as much diligence as he did at becoming skilled enough to play with the Rolling Stones. His versatility reflects in the fact that he has performed numerous classical and fusion concerts, working with Indian maestros, as well as American bigwigs like Alicia Keys, Usher, Pete Townshend, Will.I.Am, and Jay Z. In an upcoming virtual event, titled Across Cultures: Ragas in Western Consciousness, Khan will detail his experiences of working on fusions over his several decades-long career, and examine the nuances of cross-disciplinary blends.

It couldn't have been easy for an artiste of his calibre to establish himself given that he found an added set of critics in purists of Indian classical music. Apart from developing a thick skin, he admits to having changed his approach to his craft to truly enjoy the process of creating fusions. "When I began working on them, I would also think about the [nuances] of every Hindustani raag, and then analyse how I could fit a different genre within the [parameters] of this raag. I realised soon enough that one can't fuse Indian classical, or Western classical music with one another. You can only fuse music, and that can be done by thinking about the seven notes of music just as they are. When you box music into genres, creating a fusion [is tough]." Veteran listeners, he says, are distinguished from the lot in their tendency to critique "good and bad music", and not genres. "The more exposure one has, the more accepting he becomes," says Khan, who counts the cross-genre works of Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia and Ustad Zakir Hussain among the most inspirational creations of the field. Prod him on styles that he thinks are seamlessly interdigited, and he says, "Both Indian [classical music] and jazz offer enough scope for improvisation. Unlike Western classical music, which demands that one immerse himself in the world of the composer alone, and is hence played in the same way for several decades, the ideology of improvisation that Indian music and jazz offer [lends to the making of promising fusion tracks]."

Improvisation, he says, is key to creating sounds that do not mimic a previous rendition. It is also the crux that defines his ensemble, Melodic Intersect's approach. "Everything that we record is something that can be easily replicated before a live audience. While we do create a basic composition, we [encourage the expression] of nuances in improvised pieces. None of them are scripted, which is why each performance is in sync with our energies, and that of the audience on that day. Often, we don't edit errors because they are a natural [extension] of our music."