WITH his pedigree, it would have perhaps been surprising if Wajahat Khan had not become a musician. His family has been at the forefront of shaping Indian music for the past 400 years, pioneers in the development of the sitar and its bass cousin, the surbahar. His father, Ustad Imrat Khan, and late uncle, Ustad Vilayat Khan, are celebrated as two of the most influential musicians of recent years.

"I started music when I was in my mother's womb," Wajahat laughs, "because my father was practising all the time. I think it was installed within me before I was born, and they say I started singing before I started talking."

Indeed, he began his performing career before his teens as a singer and was practising ten hours a day until disaster struck: his voice broke - "I was practising so much it had a lasting effect on my throat," he says. At first he turned to the sitar, an instrument his family had done much to develop, but then picked up the sarod.

A close relative of the sitar, the sarod differs in not having frets on the fingerboard, which is metal instead of wood, and instead of being all wooden, the soundbox is covered by goat skin.

"All my brothers played sitar, my cousins played sitar, so I wanted to do something different," he says. "And also I loved the sarod very much, the sound of it, and it was a challenge. My father said it was putting my head into the lion's mouth. It offers many challenges that are different to the sitar.

"I took it very seriously and I practised like mad from scratch. When I started the sarod I was already a performing musician, and at that point I took a break in my career to learn to play."

If his musical heritage had given him a head start, it also meant there was a tremendous weight of expectation on his shoulders, particularly when he gave his first public performance on the sarod. "It was incredible pressure. People look at my family as pioneers, and when you play they are not happy with 99 per cent," he says.

"It was a great thing that I came from this background, but it was a big weight to carry."

He went on to perform at festivals over the world, and has done for the sarod what his family has done for the sitar, creating a style of playing which emulates the human voice, called gayaki ang. He has also added an extra string to the instrument.

Tomorrow, he performs at the Sage, Gateshead, in a concert presented by the Pakistan Cultural Society, where he will be playing alongside the Medici String Quartet. The programme's first half features the Medici playing Beethoven and Wajahat playing Indian classical music, before they come together in the second half to play one of Wajahat's own compositions.

But although this second half melds Indian and Western classical music, he has his reservations about the fashion for blending different styles. "Fusion has become the big thing now, and in some ways I think that's very sad," he says.

"I'm not against fusion, but I think people should first learn their own traditions before dwelling in other fields. There is a great fear that the next generation will lose out because if they only have fusion they will not get an opportunity to hear what it is about."

He fears that as funding bodies see fusion music as the way to attract a younger crowd, then pure traditional forms will lose out. "They don't know how much damage they are doing, for the next generation it will be a confused hybrid," he says. "It is like if you want to mate a horse and an elephant. They are both beautiful creatures."

He also sees in it a belief that multiculturalism is best served by forcing different traditions together, rather than respecting the values of each. "We should learn about each other rather than think it needs a mix of both," he adds.

"In some ways I'm a critic of that, although not 100 per cent because I'm doing it myself, but I believe what I'm doing is trying to keep the values of both traditions, and every time I do this fusion I'm also performing my traditional music as well."

He first met the Medici Quartet when they shared a concert some years ago in Devon, and so far it has been a fruitful partnership, playing at festivals across Europe following their debut at the Wigmore Hall in London, with tomorrow marking its North-East premiere.

"I have always felt that Indian classical music is well-suited to a string quartet, and I'm trying to use some of the values of Western classical music, the harmonies and counterpoints, but keep the purity of the Indian music intact," Wajahat says.

* Wajahat Khan and the Medici String Quartet play at the Sage, Gateshead, tomorrow, 8pm, following a pre-concert talk for ticket holders at 7pm. Box office: 0191-443 4661.