Not just chips off the old block

Amaan and Ayaan Ali Khan are finally coming out of their father's shadow.

And remember, it is Khan... Ali Khan." I have just finished my interview with Amaan and Ayaan, brothers, sarodists, young men who confess to "feeling very old sometimes", and those are Ayaan's parting words to me.

Amaan has just rushed off to keep his appointment, ostensibly with a homeopathic doc in Connaught Place, but not before giving me three reasons as to why these sons of Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, hitherto referred to as the "Bangash brothers" at classical concerts and on society pages alike, have dropped the Bangash surname.

"Our birth certificate has Khan as the surname but for 10 years we adopted Bangash, which is the family name, because we thought we would be exclusive in the midst of so many Khans," Amaan says.

He adds, "But it became too tiring to explain this to people, especially foreign audiences, who would never connect us to our father, and besides they couldn't pronounce it anyway." I raise my eyebrows and look suitably sceptical.

"Numerology?" I prod. Amaan concedes, "Er, actually many spiritual people and senior musicians told us that Bangash would not work for us," and then grins rather disarmingly. "Besides, Khan is in vogue"!

So are Amaan and Ayaan Ali Khan. For a long time now, ever since the worlds of music and P3P discovered them simultaneously ("we were never presented on stage formally, we grew up in this world") the brothers have lived under the shadows of their father.

Now judging by their recent performances, they seem to be finally coming into their own. At the recently concluded festival of Sufi music, Jahan-e-Khusrau, in Delhi for instance, the stars of the show were not Sukhwinder and Daler Mehndi (participating as a bow to populism perhaps), not even Abida Parveen, reigning deity, who seemed out of form "" it was Amaan and Ayaan's show.

The brothers shocked and wowed their audience with their "experimental performance", wherein sarod kept company with drums, guitar and the keyboard and the brothers actually broke into a tarana "" a vocal form that traces its origins to Amir Khusrau.

"People come to our concerts thinking we'll only play the sarod, so when we sing it is a bonus," Amaan points out. Jahan-e-Khusrau was not the first time the brothers got into this mode.

They created similar music in front of the Siddhivinayak temple in Mumbai sometime ago and this is exactly what they will do in some of their forthcoming albums.

Two years ago, Amaan and Ayaan made their debut electronica album Reincarnation, taking their first "experimental" step in lounge music, with the prodding of friends (who wanted them to do "easy listening") and the blessings of their father.

The music video featuring the duo "" and some girls"" was on air for a while. Reincarnation 2 followed last year in a similar vein. But this year, there will be a change. Reincarnation 3 is one of the four albums, Amaan and Ayaan are working on.

The video, shot in Calcutta, should go on air this week; what will be missing, however, will be the women. The family apparently got a lot of negative mail and decided to pay heed.

"You don't need sleaze to sell music, it doesn't talk very highly of your music," they say. Besides, "we are not doing it for glamour, just to be on TV".

Forget their forgettable stint as Sa Re Ga Ma Pa anchors. Or that they've now roped in Globosport, Mahesh Bhupati's company, "which also manages Saif and Sania", to look at endorsements.

Striding modernity and tradition can never be easy. Long ago, when I still learnt Hindustani vocal, I had a 19-year-old "masterji" who never failed to surprise me with the incongruity between his flashy college-boy dressing and the seriousness with which he would conduct a lesson, trying to pass on the legacy of his gharana.

That image visits me again as I watch Amaan and Ayaan "" cool shades, cool phones, cool attitudes but charmingly old-fashioned manners; they spring to greet their former school teacher. That and the thought "not Modern School types at all".

But Amaan and Ayaan are all earnest as they explain that for all their "mainstreaming", without tradition, they would be just a "bandwallah". "We will never distort a raag," they promise.

On the other hand, their new kind of music may help take forward tradition as well. "Because if people love us, they will come to hear whatever we are playing." Touche.