Honoring a Maestro

Partha Chatterjee and fellow musicians playing in memory of the late Nikhil Banerjee at the Smithsonian Institution, USA-Legacy Tour '08.

North Indian classical music is one of the oldest forms of music on the planet. During its 5,000-plus years of history, it has developed a strong tradition in various forms of its presentation, vocal as well as instrumental. And yet, in every generation there are a few who through their sheer genius take this tradition many steps further.

Nikhil Banerjee was one such brilliant sitarist in the rich tradition known as Senia Maihar gharana (gharana means school or style). Banerjee passed away in 1986 at the prime of his musical career. His legacy will be remembered with a memorial concert on Saturday, July 31.

Banerjee studied with Baba Allauddin Khan, the doyen of Senia Maihar gharana, and later with Khan's son, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, a well-respected musician who founded a North Indian classical music school in the Bay Area in the 1960s.

In later years, Banerjee was influenced by the great Hindustani vocalist Amir Khan, whose music inspired him to give a new dimension to the form and style of sitar playing. Overall, Banerjee absorbed the best of his gurus as well as the excellence of his predecessors and contemporaries and spun a texture of music, which is unique and comprehensive.

Banerjee had few students, but one senior student is Partha Chatterjee, whose association with Banerjee resulted in more than 12 years of intensive training on sitar in the unique style and tradition that Banerjee developed. After the passing of his guru, Chatterjee continued his musical training under Ustad Ali Akbar Khan.

Chatterjee has been visiting the Bay Area regularly since 1999 and teaching music to a dedicated group of students. He is guided by the simple and yet unerring philosophy of music of Banerjee.

Great emphasis is placed on teaching in the traditional guru-shishya (teacher-student) interaction, where nuances of the music are taught orally by teacher to student. In the course of this training, students derive, imbibe, and slowly generate all technical and artistic details as they hear them from their guru. Without mechanical academic pressure, the student learns in a natural way.

To create a proper atmosphere and generate in the students skill and artistic feeling about performance, house concerts have been organized by the students since 2003 at least once each year. For the past two years the concerts have been dedicated to the memory of Banerjee. The concert features students of various levels, comprised of not only sitar players, but also practitioners of Indian slide guitar, cello, vocal, and bansuri, the Indian bamboo flute.

The month of July/August coincides with Indian lunar calendar month Aashaadh. The full moon night in that month is celebrated as "Guru Purnima," when students offer their tribute to their guru, often through the presentation of the art form they learned from the guru.

Partha Chatterjee's students will hold the third annual Nikhil Banerjee Memorial Concert where they pay their tributes to the great maestro and to their guru.

Saturday, July 31, three sessions from 9 a.m.-8 p.m. Divine Science Community Center, 1540 Hicks Road, San Jose. Free. www.parthacsitar.com.