Raag Bhairav (on Sitar) -by Nikhil Banerjee

Enjoy the morning with meditative sitar of Legendary Nikhil Banerjee Nikhil Banerjee (1931 - 1986) "Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Banerjee's Carnegie Hall performance last November: ''The extraordinary fluidity and assurance of his rhythmic ideas and phrasing set a pace and a standard that would have left most of the international 'stars' of Indian music far behind.'' Mr. Banerjee was born in Calcutta in 1931. He was a child prodigy and won the top award in the All Bengal Sitar Competition at the age of 9. He also became the youngest musician ever employed by All India Radio, where he worked for five years. Mr. Banerjee studied northern Indian classical music for seven years with the sitarist Ustad Allauddin Khan (who was also Ravi Shankar's teacher), and then became a student of the sarodist Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. Mr. Banerjee began touring outside India in 1954. In 1968 India awarded him the honorary title Padma Shri; that same year, he was named India's Outstanding Musician of the Year by the Sangeet Natak (Music and Dance) Academy. At the time of his death, he had established an international career; he was also a professor at the Ali Akbar College of Music in Calcutta."_The New York Times