Welcome to the Lucknow-Shahjahanpur Gharana Archive, a dedicated collection celebrating the rich heritage and artistic legacy of one of the oldest instrumental-music traditions within Hindusthani music.
The archive offers an immersive journey through rare recordings, historic performances, and invaluable documents that capture the essence of the gharana’s (musical lineage) unique styles, aesthetics and innovations and allows a glimpse into an old and almost lost world of music.
Whether you’re a student, scholar, performer, or enthusiast, explore the deep-rooted traditions and evolution of an illustrious gharana (musical lineage), preserving its contributions for future generations.
I started learning under the current head of the gharana, Ustad Irfan Khan in 2017 and promptly began to digitize his huge collection of analog recordings of his ancestors -at first to enhance my own taleem (learning) and to share it with my Guru-bhais (co-learners). Later I started the LSGA YouTube channel and the „Last-Mohican Records“ Bandcamp-page and published the most valuable recordings on these platforms. Finally i created this website to summon all scattered threads in one place.
All the audio content has been carefully digitized, restored and remastered for optimum sound by me under the guidance of my teacher Ustad Irfan Khan whose vast collection of cassette & spool tapes, 78 rpm shellac discs, photos, videos, manuscripts and other gharana memorabilia is the main source of this archive. The historic paper clippings from „The Indian Listener“ (a listings magazine, first published in December 1935 by the Indian State Broadcasting Service) have been collected and kindly shared by Aftab Datta and Kiran Naiga. Invaluable research work, that forms the base of our texts has been done by Max Katz, Adrian McNeil, Masakazu Tamori, Arnab Chakrabarty and Markus Schlaffke.
You can access the archive by clicking on any musician in the genealogical table below.