Within the first five minutes of my interview with local Indian classical musician and sarod player, Ross Kent, I felt like I was in an advanced history course on Indian classical music and the teachings of gurus like Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. I can now confidently say I know the difference between the Raga system and the Tala, the sarod versus the sitar… you get the idea. I already knew this was going to be a very special and unique experience, but it’s not every day I get to interview musicians who know more about the deeply rooted history of specific international musical practices than I know about anything.
Indian classical music in particular has been taught and passed down for thousands of years. I had the honor of coming across Indian classical musicians including Kent and Josh Williams, a tabla (Indian hand drums, similarly shaped to bongo drums) drummer and a student of Kent’s, at a wedding performance last month. And if you read my article on Tenley Wallace (a local dancer who specializes in ancient dances of Asia) it was Wallace who also referred Kent to me.
After Kent and Williams’ enchanting and spiritually awakening performance — because it’s also not every day you hear or see Indian classical music in Central Oregon — I was allured to know more about Kent’s life based on a rumor that he had played with Shankar.
Kent studied at the Ali Akbar College of Music in Berkeley, California, from 1967 to 1981, under Ali Akbar Khan, continuing to study, “intermittently from then on. . .,” Kent shared. “I could go to class just by getting out my notes.” Still to this day he has his original class notes from 56 years ago. The Ali Akbar College of Music was formed in 1967 after Ali Akbar Khan’s teaching began to catch wide interest among Bay Area musicians. Among many, Aki Akbar Khan was and still is Kent’s claimed guru.
Khan’s father, Allauddin Khan (and father-in-law to Ravi Shankar) was also a sarod player, in addition to being one of the most notable Indian classical musicians of the 20th Century. It is from this Gharana — a word used in Hindustani music of India to reflect family or lineage —that Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and Allauddin Khan brought north Indian music to the world. Akbar Khan went on to receive a MacArther Foundation Fellow Award, as Kent phrased it, the “Genius Grant,” in 1991.
During our interview, Kent reflected on the depth of Akbar Khan’s compulsion to teach, and the responsibility of teaching Indian music seriously, with excellence and perfection. After living and traveling around the globe, Kent continues to adopt this philosophy in his playing and teachings, which is how he connected with Williams.
Williams, originally from Madras, connected with Kent in Maui, Hawaii. After a long quest to find a tabla teacher, Williams found the Fulbright Award-winning tabla player, Daniel Paul, who also studied at AACM, like Kent.
“People get turned off by Indian music. Instruments are complicated and the doors don’t open for anybody. The key to the door is knowing the elders,” Williams said. Similarly to Kent, Williams has lived his life in devotion to the lifetime of knowledge in ancient classical styles of Indian music. Williams continued, “Paradoxical rules. . . these are the rules that set you free.”
During our conversation we also touched on the “10,000-hour rule” touted by Malcolm Gladwell — which asserts that “the key to achieving true expertise in any skill is simply a matter of practicing, albeit in the correct way, for at least 10,000 hours.” According to Williams, the earliest musicians of Hindustani music probably achieved this by the time they were 10 years old. To keep the tradition alive, Williams and Kent offer lessons, lectures, demos and performances right here in Bend.
And as for Kent and Ravi Shankar? That lives off the record.
Information on Ross Kent and Josh Williams at: myhorsejourney.com/music-inquiry.
This article appears in Source Weekly August 10, 2023.
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