Ustad Ghulam Sadiq Khan — Raga Lalit
from Versatile Ragas
I was in India earlier this year, and one day I dragged a friend around Delhi looking for records, CDs and mp3 DVDs at street stalls and shops. I saw this disc in a modern, HMV-style CD shop in New Delhi, and picked it up for just a few dollars.
It was a remarkable find, for this man’s voice is truly like no other. In fact, at times it sounds unlike a human voice at all. Here the vocal chords are reinvented as an entirely new instrument. The style is a modern Indian classical genre called khayal, thought to have developed from the qawwali style of singing.
‘Raga Lalit’ is an early morning raga.
Khan in 2009
