Brij Narayan is an Indian classical musician who plays the string instrument sarod.
Background
Narayan was born in the Indian state Rajasthan and began to study sarod from a young age under his father Ram Narayan and other teachers. He won the All India Radio instrumentalist competition in 1967 and accompanied his father on a tour to Afghanistan in 1969. Narayan was born on 25 April 1952 in Udaipur, Rajasthan as the oldest son of sarangi player Ram Narayan.
Education
Narayan graduated from the University of Mumbai in 1972 and has since worked on movies and toured Africa, Europe, and America. Narayan knows how to play sarangi, but chose to specialize in playing the sarod, stating he believed his background would give him an advantage over other sarod players and that he liked its "combination of melody and percussion". Narayan studied for a short time under his uncle, tabla player Chatur Lal, and sarod player Ali Akbar Khan in Delhi, but returned to study under his father following Lal"s death in 1965.
Career
He was taught music from an early age and began playing the sarod at the age of seven. In the late 1960s, he was the subject of a movie, participated in a 1969 cultural delegation tour of Afghanistan with his father, and became a scholar of the Bharat Sangeet Sabha. Narayan graduated from the University of Mumbai in 1972 and became a full-time musician.
He performed at the Munich Olympics the same year.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he toured Africa, Europe, and America, and he recorded several albums, including a collaboration with Zakir Hussain. Narayan played in the 1978 movie Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki and composed music for the 1988 movie The Bengali Night by Nicolas Klotz, which starred Hugh Grant.
Narayan performed for the Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth, to interest young Indians in Indian classical music, and played on the 2002 album Music Detected by Deep Forest. Neil Sorrell has described Narayan as one of the best sarod players of the present time in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.