Rare albums of Indian classical music

One of the albums I really consider as "rare" is the 2-cassette set called "Sitar Legend" released by T-Series in the late '80s, featuring Ustad Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan. I bought it in 1991. Those days I used to buy a lot of cassettes from a music shop called "Sunil Live Cassettes" [which no longer exists now] in Gandhi Bazaar, Bangalore. The shop owner [the late husband of famous Kannada singer B. K. Sumitra] saw me buying a lot of classical albums and suggested that I should buy "Sitar Legend". At that time, I had never heard of Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan and I used to be of the opinion that "Sitar Means Ravi Shankar!" Impressed by his sincere recommendation [he had personally met Ustadji during his many trips to Bangalore and around], I purchased the 2 cassette set.

And, that is one of the best pieces of music that I ever bought!

The ragas featured are - Pahadi, Kedar, Jaunpuri, and Kirwani. All of them are around 30 minutes in length. Tabla is by Sadashiv Pawar.

I was completely bowled over by Ustad's style of playing sitar -- the "Jafferkhani Baaz". I have never heard anything like that in the past fifteen years, though I have sampled so many different sitar artists. Halim Jaffer Khan's Pahadi is something that every fan of Hindustani music should listen to. It is that great!

I had the pleasure of traveling with Pandit Shivkumar Sharma to Puttaparti in the year 2003 and he asked me to play that Pahadi. He told me that Halim Jafferji's Pahadi is widely known in the artst circles as one of the greatest performance of that raga. However, he said that the initial Alap, Jod, and Slow Gat in Addha Taal, all of them resembled Raga Manjh Khamaj, more than Pahadi. However, the last piece, a fast Gat in Teen Taal, was indeed Pahadi. That was an education for me. I was totally thrilled that I could sit next to a great maestro like Shivji and listen to this piece of music. You might be knowing that Shivkumar Sharma himself is very well known for his rendition of Pahadi.

OK, why do I consider this as a rare album? I haven't see those cassettes in any of the music shops since 1991. Believe me, I have visited a good number of shops, including online shops.
I was sweetly surprised to see that Shrimati's at Berkeley, California had these casettes in their store! Shrimati's is a great place to find rare albums. I purchased the set again and used my tape-to-CD converter to digitize the same!

If all goes well, this album will show up on iTunes soon!!