It was like watching an Indian classical answer to Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker crashing through their favourite Robert Johnson covers at the Cream revival earlier this month. Amjad Ali Khan may be a master of the sarod rather than the guitar, but once he had built up to the crescendo of his solo set - improvising furiously around the melody line with repeated, rapid-fire playing and then letting his equally frantic tabla player take over - it was easy to see why great Indian music can be as exciting as classic blues and rock.

What is most remarkable about Amjad Ali Khan is that he is not better known in the west. The Festival Hall was rightly packed, but the audience were mostly Indian. Khan has never courted western pop success, as once did Ravi Shankar (to his eventual regret), yet in many ways his style is even more accessible. The sarod looks like a cross between a guitar and a thick-necked banjo with no frets on the fingerboard, and in his hands it sounded like a versatile Asian answer to the slide guitar, capable of anything from slow, delicate work to those furious improvisations.

An elegant, grey-haired man sporting a red tunic, Khan sat cross-legged to play, starting very slowly and then building up the tempo in his ragas, matching melody lines against rapid flurries, balanced against rhythm from the instrument's top strings. Like a west African griot, he comes from a long line of hereditary musicians, and the tradition still continues: at the start of the second half he left the stage so that his two sons, Amaan and Ayaan, could show off their sarod skills. Then he returned to put them through their paces, making them match his ever more complex musical phrases in a wild and suddenly deafening climax.

· At the Salisbury festival on Sunday. Box office: 01722 320333.