Adnan Sami

Adnan Sami Khan (born 15 August 1971) is an Indian singer, musician, music composer, actor and pianist.

He performs Indian and Western music, including in Hindi, Urdu, English, Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada.

He has been awarded with Padma Shri (India's fourth highest civilian award) for his remarkable contribution in music.

His most notable instrument is the piano.

He has been credited as "the first musician to have played the santoor and Indian classical music on the piano".

A review in the US-based Keyboard magazine described him as the fastest keyboard player in the world and called him the keyboard discovery of the nineties.

He was raised and educated in the United Kingdom and spent his life in Canada.

He was born to Arshad Sami Khan, a Pakistani Air Force veteran and diplomat of Pashtun origin, and Naureen, who was originally from the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir.

The Times of India has called him the "Sultan of Music".

Sami was born in London, England on 15 August 1971.

He was raised and educated in the United Kingdom.

His father, Arshad Sami Khan, was a Pakistani Pashtun with roots in Afghanistan while his mother Naureen Khan was an Indian from Jammu.

Adnan's father served as a Pakistan Air Force pilot, before becoming a senior bureaucrat and serving as Pakistan's ambassador to 14 countries.

His paternal great-great-grandfather, General Ahmed Jan, was from Afghanistan and a military advisor to king Abdur Rahman Khan.

His paternal great-grandfather Agha Mehfooz Jan was the governor of four Afghan provinces under King Amanullah Khan's reign and was also the King's first cousin, while his paternal grandfather Abdul Sami Khan served as the Deputy Inspector General of Police.

Agha Mehfooz Jan was assassinated by Habibullah Kalakani and therefore Sami's father's family migrated to Peshawar, then in British India.

Sami attended Rugby School in Rugby, West Midlands, UK.

Adnan followed his bachelor's degree with a law degree (LLB) from King's College London.

He went on to qualify as a barrister from Lincoln's Inn, England.

He had played the piano since the age of five and composed his first piece of music when he was nine years old.

Sami began taking lessons in Indian classical music from the santoor maestro Pandit Shivkumar Sharma when visiting India during his school vacations.

Indian singer Asha Bhosle saw him at age ten at an R. D. Burman concert in London, and encouraged him to take up music as a career.

He is an accomplished concert pianist, music composer and singer with a command of Indian and Western classical/semi-classical music, jazz, rock and pop music.

As a teenager, Adnan, when performing on the piano on a TV program in Stockholm, was described by the US-based Keyboard magazine as the fastest man on keyboard in the world and the keyboard discovery of the nineties.

Sami went on to learn Indian classical music from Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, the Santoor maestro in India.

At the age of sixteen, Sami was approached to write a song for famine-hit Ethiopia, for which he won a special award from UNICEF.

In his career of 32 years, Sami has won many international awards including the Nigar Award, Bolan Academy Award and Graduate Award.

Adnan is the youngest recipient of the Naushad Music Award for Excellence in Music.

Previous recipients of this award include Lata Mangeshkar and Music Maestro Khayam.

Sami was invited as a member of the jury of the music festival Voice of Asia competition held annually at Almaty, Kazakhstan.

His first single, "Run for His Life", was released in 1986.

It was in English, and recorded for UNICEF.

It went to No. 1 in the music charts in the Middle East.

This was followed by three more No. 1s: "Talk to Me", "Hot Summer Day" and "You're My Best Kept Secret".

His first formal album, The One & Only (1989), was a classical album on the piano accompanied by tabla maestro Zakir Hussain.

He released his first vocal solo album Raag Time in 1991.

The song from his album Teri Yaad was the title track of his first album, which became a huge hit in Pakistan.

In 1994, he composed music for a film for the first time.

In 2016 he became an Indian citizen.

He was awarded the Padma Shri on 26 January 2020.