Twenty-two years is a long time. For that many years his father and guru, Ustad Shahmir Khan Saheb, did not allow Ustad Amir Khan Saheb to sing the ragas in the aakaar ^ that is, aa-wise, or with his mouth opened to the 'aa'.
He was made to sing in sargam only ^ that is, using the note-names. The word sargam comes from putting together the first four notes of the scale, sa, re, ga and ma. It was a penance.
However, the single most profound foundation that went into the making of one of the most strikingly meditative styles or schools of the khayal in the history of Hindustani music was the Indore gayaki.
As he would recall many a time, there had been this one instance when Ustad Amir Khan Saheb had sung in the aakaar, in an impromptu recital at a sammelan, a music festival close to his father's place of residence at the court of Indore. For this he received great accolades, but he had sung the aakaar without his father's permission. He returned home only to be so severely beaten up by Ustad Shahmir Khan Saheb that he had to run away from home and stay in hiding for several days after that, for fear of the rod being used on him again!
Twenty-two years were not yet over! Perhaps this is how he wished to keep his son grounded in the swaras. Perhaps it was a symbolic period in the configurations of the abhyas or practice time-cycle, one year of practice for each of the 22 shrutis or micro-tones that went into the making of the seven swaras, corresponding to the 22 ribs in the breathing cage.
Whatever the reason, Ustad Shahmir Khan Saheb's profound method of swara-gyan, or study of the swaras, was meant to lay such an extraordinary foundation of the notes in his son, that when Ustad Amir Khan Saheb did sing in the aakaar, it was pure meditation. There was nothing more left to know about the swaras. There were no more doubts about the distances between the notes, the relationships of the shrutis or microtones when they connected with the interconnectivities of the tones or notes, differently in different ragas. There were no doubts about how the notes had to be produced and applied vis-a-vis other notes, to produce the divine hues and colours of the ragas... Once the doubts are cleared, what remains is pure and simple meditation. The musician does not have to merge. He has already merged. His singing becomes the akashvani, the speaking of the heavens.
Sargam and aakaar were complimentary. And when Ustad Amir Khan Saheb did create a style of his own ^ an abstract and deeply introspective style of singing ^ he turned the sargam-aakaar sequence the other way round. He would sing the raga in the aakaar, as usual, and then proceed, mid-way, with the sargam, ''so the listener could also understand what had been going on in the aakaar''.
Here, he did away with the traditional bol-bant or singing of lyrics in a divided format with a faster tempo, which he felt was chewing the words, making them crude. The sargam part was conducive to his meditative temperament. It "began to function as a torch, giving you the specific inside picture of the aalaap, how it was being conceived, and what was going on, all of which immensely heightened your enjoyment of the aalaap in the aakaar. It was no longer awesome. You were with it just like the musician himself", explained Pandit Amarnath, master of the gharana, to his students when teaching this 'sargam ang ka khayal', a connoisseur's delight.