Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan: Raga Darbari, ca. 1930

There is a shrine in one corner of the current location of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House, at 275 Church Street, in Manhattan's TriBeCa, dedicated to two individuals without whom the Dream House would not exist: their teacher and guru Pandit Pran Nath, and above him, on the wall, one of the few extant photographs of Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, who was Pandit Pran Nath's own teacher.

But perhaps "teacher" isn't the right word. When Pandit Pran Nath first left home in Lahore, in his early teens, and approached the Ustad, who lived in the same city, he was roundly rejected. Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, for one thing, was not into taking on Hindu students — he is on record as having objected vocally to his more famous cousin and contemporary Ustad Abdul Karim Khan's unusual practice of accepting Hindu, especially Brahmin students to his innovative neo-gurukul, the Arya Sangeet Vidyalaya, in Poona. For another, he was just extremely old-school and of a markedly quietist Sufi bent: he refused to be recorded (the music in this short clip is from a radio session secretly recorded by a sound engineer at All India Radio in 1947), rarely performed publicly, resisted the modernizing, reformist adaptations and adjustments that Ustad Abdul Karim Khan embraced, and was just a generally thorny individual. Pandit Pran Nath used to say to his students — not without a sense of pride — that the poor hearing he had in one of his ears was due to the beatings that he received regularly during a very rough apprenticeship — one that began with years of menial service to the household and only gradually moved into explicitly musical matters.

Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan's style, like Pandit Pran Nath's, tends toward the epic and glacially slow: he preferred the ati vilambit (or super-slow) and the alap, or unmeasured introductory section to a raga. For singers of the Kirana gharana, the alap section is infused with a deep and esoteric mysticism that, by both its very nature and by the stringent demands of discipleship, is not something that can be or should be discussed openly, on the internet or anywhere else. Sound is God, said Pandit Pran Nath, and that much you may know just from listening to this brief sample of his rendition of the austere, architectonic nighttime raga Darbari. This is precisely the sort of raga that Kirana khayal singers excel at: grave and powerful, and extremely difficult to master — and when mastered capable of delivering intense emotional and physical effects. When I spoke with La Monte Young about my interest in the Kirana gharana, the first question he asked me was whether I had heard the recording of Abdul Wahid Khan from which this is taken. I know he considers it one of the most important recordings ever made by any artist. According to gharana lore, the reclusive Ustad only practiced two ragas: Todi in the morning and Darbari at night, and that when he was asked why, he answered that if morning were to last forever he would drop the Darbari.

Slow tempos, sustained tones, sonic sacrifice to the Unseen, discipleship and soul-shattering aural gnosis? Thank God the sun sets, and night comes.