Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, sarod; Pt. Ishwar Lal Misra, tabla

Raga Marwa (alap, jor) & Raga Purvi Kalyan (vilambit and drut gats in tin-tala). This concert took place March 25, 1995 at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin, as part of the Ravi Shankar Series, a performance series I established while on the faculty of the university that was made possible by a benefit concert performed by Pandit Ravi Shankar a few years earlier. Ishwar Lal Misra, my friend extending back to 1970 when he was a visiting artist at the University of Pennsylvania, accompanied Khansaheb for the first time. Ishwar Lal was a master of larant, a style of accompaniment akin to double-talk, where the percussion accompanist joins the fray of rhythmic extemporizations by the main artist simultaneously, resulting sometimes in the question "Who's on first?" (as in, Where is the first beat of the tala [i.e., sam] hiding?). Some glimpses of that accompaniment style are heard here.