Veteran Sitar player Ustad Shamin Ahmed Khan no more

Mumbai : Veteran Sitar player from the Maihar Gharana, Ustad Shamin Ahmed Khan, passed away here this morning following a cardiac arrest, family sources said.

The 73-year-old artist was a disciple of sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar. Shankar had taken Khan along to San Francisco, US, in 1967.

Before that, he had taught at Ravi Shankar’s Kinnar School of Music in Mumbai. In the United States, in addition to playing at various concerts, Khan played sitar for Hollywood films such as Clint Eastwood’s Coogan’s Bluff and Charlie, for which Pandit Ravi Shankar had composed the music.

Yehudi Menuhin, the world-renowned violinist, had said after hearing Khan at the Tata Theatre in the late 1970s that Khan displayed "an absolutely extraordinary sense of pitch and tone in a highly mathematical, complex time structure and rhythmic patterns".