Ashraf Shareef Khan

Raag Sham Kalyan - I
Raag Sham Kalyan-11
This is a recording of a live concert of Ashraf Sharif Khan which he played in Karachi on April 9, 2007.
The concert was organised by Sampoorna ( Mrs Safiya Saleem Baig) .

About Ashraf Shareef Khan
 - Prof. Hassan Azad    
 

Ashraf is the youngest son of the late Ustad Mohammad Sharif Khan, who died in 1980 at the age of 54 years, when Ashraf was only 11 years old. He is the only one in his immediate family who has taken up music as a profession. He was therefore left practically to his own devices to carry forward his father's legacy. This recording is a testimony to the sheer determination and self discipline of Ashraf to carry forward the illustrious traditions of his school. Like his father, Ashraf has a very distinctive tone, voice and intonation. The connoisseur will notice a marked Dhurpad and Veena influence as Ustad Shareef Khan was also an outstanding Veena player ( and produced a tone which is unsurpassed to this date- as will become apparent when Virsa presents an acoustic essay on him). Besides Ashraf, other students of Ustad Shareef Khan are Farrukh Bashir and Noor Zahra Kazim , daughter of the well known musicologist Raza Kazim , and the author of this note.

Ashraf is settled for the last 10 years in Germany. It is a testimony to his self discpline that he has not let his experiments with fusion groups - spanish as well as arabic- interfere or influence directly his sitar playing.

A word about the instrument: Ashraf's sitar - which has a wooden resonating chamber( toomba) -was custom made
by Mohammad Ramzan , son of the well known sitar maker Sher Mohammad from Lahore.