Latif Ahmed Khan was one of my favourite players, and his recordings for the BBC in the 1970s with the sitar player Imrat Khan were inspirational for me when I first got interested in Indian music. He learned from the Delhi musicians Gameh Khan and his son Inam Ali Khan. Latif had a clarity of tone that was very exciting, and more than most tabla players of his day he relished the opportunity to improvise (much rarer in drumming than most people think). His peshkar openings became very long and drawn out, often beginning sparsely, continuing with many changes in rhythmic density along the way, and ending in an electrifying burst of bols some ten to fifteen minutes later. He told me once that he was inspired by the alaps of vocal and instrumental performance, and treated his own peshkars as the equivalent of an alap in which the gamut of tone colours and stroke combinations were gradually revealed. I also heard him play his own Latif Tal at Alastair Dick's house in London in 1980: this was a five-and-a-quarter count structure (i.e., three plus half of three plus a quarter of three). The recording of it here was made in Lausanne in 1977. Latif died in 1989: he had destroyed his health with alcohol.