An obit on the Ali Akbar College of Music website noted that Khan had been a dialysis patient since 2004 but still taught at the San Rafael, Calif., school until just two weeks ago. He died at his home in nearby San Anselmo, Calif.

Khan was born in what is today Bangladesh in 1922 and began playing the 25-stringed sarod and other instruments as a young boy.

He studied under his father, Ustad Allauddin Khan, who is considered the greatest figure in north Indian music in the 20th century, enduring sessions that often lasted 18 hours a day, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Khan performed in public for the first time at age 14 in Allahabad, India and in his early 20s become a court musician for the maharajah of Jodhpur. In 1955, he made his first performance in the U.S., presenting a concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

“I didn’t want to come at all,” Khan previously told the Times. “I wanted to open a college in Calcutta . . . and when I came here, people didn’t have any idea that India had some kind of classical music. . . . But I played and I liked the audiences, and I think they liked me.”

Khan was considered a “National Living Treasure” in India and in the U.S. he was credited with helping introduce North Indian classical music to the states.

He opened his college in Calcutta, which closed in the 1960s, and then taught under the auspices of the American Society for Eastern Arts in Berkeley in 1965 and 1966. In 1967 Khan opened his own music school in Berkeley and then later moved it to San Rafael.

His recorded more than 95 albums in addition to composing scores for Indian and Western movies.

In 1991 Khan became the first Indian musician to receive the genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Six years later he was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship, considered America’s highest award for traditional folk arts and crafts.

Click here for the Los Angeles Times story.

Click here for the Ali Akbar College of Music website.