An album with Ilyas Khan Sahebs music can be found here: https://matyasitar.bandcamp.com/album...

Ustad Ilyas Khan - Sitar
Ustad Akbar Hussain "Ballu" Khan - Tabla
recording date unknown, probably early eighties

Sitarya Ustad Ilyas Khan (1924-1989) -second son of the legendary sarod maestro Ustad Sakhawat Hussain Khan (1875-1955) of Lucknow-Shahjahanpur Gharana was a phenomenal musician with a huge repertoire of Ragas and old compositions. Most of his life he was teaching music at the Bhatkhande College in Lucknow and lived a life devoted to music.

"Ilyas Khan was roughly a contemporary of Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan and Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan. Yet few listeners today have heard of him, let alone his recorded music. He added to his gharana’s knowledge bank by studying, in addition to his family’s repertoire, more gats and dhrupads from the sitar gharana of Kalpi, near Lucknow. His non-family teachers had been the ustads Abdul Ghani Khan, a dhrupad singer, and Yusuf Ali Khan, a sitarist and sitar maker (also the original designer of the kharaj-pancham sitar that is today synonymous with Ravi Shankar)." (quoted from Arnab Chakrabarty´s article in scroll.in)

Prof. James R Kippen writes about Ballu Khan:
"Akbar Hussain "Ballu" Khan was a marvelous tabla player of the Lucknow gharana. However, he himself always insisted that what distinguished him was his separate heritage from the Kothiwal gharana. "Kothiwal," literally "residents of the mansion," referred to the gift of a large house in Lucknow by a Nawabi patron, and it described the lineage of Modhu and Zahid Khan, two brothers who hailed from Punjab but who migrated to Lucknow around 1830 directly from Jhajjar, just west of Delhi, where they had been in court service. It was this Modhu Khan who is said to have taught Ram Sahai, the apical figure of the Benares tabla gharana. The family left Lucknow following the momentous events of 1857 and moved east to Patna and then Calcutta in search of new sources of patronage. Interestingly, the tabla players of the Kothiwal lineage all became professional sarangi players around 1900.
Ballu Khan's father was a sarangi player, but Ballu himself learned tabla directly from Chuttan Khan of the Lucknow lineage. According to Ballu Khan, Chuttan Khan was the first cousin of the great Abid Hussain, and he had learned some tabla compositions from elders of the Kothiwal tradition. Thus, Ballu Khan believed he had actually inherited something of his family's distinctive repertoire and style.
Ballu Khan was attached for many years to AIR in Bombay, but he also spent many years on transfer to Lucknow AIR in the 1970s and 1980s before retiring to live out his days in Bombay. While in Lucknow he taught his grandson Tahir Hussain Khan, who is currently a professional tabla player in Bombay. Ballu Khan died in 1997."

Recording and Ilyas Khan pictures taken from the archive of Ustad Irfan MD Khan.
Akbar Hussain "Ballu" Khan photo by Prof. James R Kippen. Thanks!

More recordings of Ilyas Khan from our channel:

   • ILYAS KHAN