Ustad Aashish Khan in performance with Ustad Zakir Hussain

“I was driving at 80 miles an hour down the highway when Zakir’s wife Toni called with the news. I felt goose pimples all over.” The excitement in the voice is palpable as Ustad Aashish Khan speaks of the moment of knowing about his Grammy nomination.

The sarod player figures in the Traditional World Music Album category, along with Ustad Zakir Hussain on the tabla, for their album Golden Strings of the Sarode.

What has moved Khan most is the fact that it is pure Indian classical music that is getting the recognition, that too for a lesser-known instrument like sarod. In the album, they have played three ragas — Lalita Gouri, Bhimpalashree and Mishra Bhairavi. “Indian nominations are mostly for fusion music. When I am introduced as a classical musician, people often ask, ‘So you play the sitar?’ I have to tell them about sarod.”

Funnily, Khan had doubts about the recording quality of the session that has fetched him the nomination. “Zakir had called me to find out if I was free to test a new equipment by a company called Meyersound. So we sat on a dais in the church at Berkeley. It was a Nagra digital machine but there was just one microphone and that, too, was placed about 15 feet away. How could I have high expectations?”

Later, Zakir informed him that the recording had come off so well that the practice session would be released as an album. “He said he was cutting out the tabla solos and keeping the rest and I was to send brief descriptions of the ragas we had played to the company.” The next he heard of the album was the Grammy nomination news.

The two Ustads go back a long way. “I am about 10-12 years senior to him. His father (tabla legend Ustad Allah Rakha) loved me like a second son. The first time we played together was in Gujarat. He was barely 11 or 12.” And then Aashish went off to the US to teach music in the University of Washington, Seattle. But when he needed an accompanist, the only name he could think of was Zakir’s. “He came over and then together, we went on what was his first Europe tour. It was soon after that John Mclaughlin took him in Shakti (a cult acoustic group).

His first trip to Calcutta after the nomination strikes an emotional chord in the son of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and grandson of Ustad Allauddin Khan. “It was here that I gave my first public performance, with my father and grandfather.” The occasion was the Tansen Music Conference in 1952-53 and he was about 12-13. But what he remembers clearly is the photograph of the three that came out in Anandabazar Patrika.

In recent times, the son had earned the father’s ire by claiming the family to be of Hindu descent. But all that is a thing of the past. “Though I didn’t tell him, Baba came to know of the nomination and called on his own to congratulate me. He also asked about what all I have played in the album.”

Khan joined the California School of Arts last January. “I am teaching 65 students over 24 hours every week. It’s vacation time now,” laughs the 67-year-old.