Diplomats could learn a thing or two from Shujaat Khan and Kayhan Kalhor. Not only have the great sitarist and the equally respected kamancheh player figured out a way to combine their respective musical cultures, they’ve reached a happy détente on the thorny question of the preshow nosh.

“Indian food is too spicy for Kayhan, and I find Persian food very bland,” confesses Khan, on the line from his home in Mumbai. “But if we’re eating Indian food Kayhan will order chicken tikka and dal, which are safe. If I’m eating Persian food I carry my own powder with me, chili powder, which I’ll sprinkle over everything. And then Kayhan loves Italian food and I love Chinese, so we find a lot of stuff to eat. We manage very well.”

Apart from a shared fondness for slow-cooked stews—flavoured with nuts and pomegranate molasses in Kalhor’s birthplace, aromatic spices and chilies in the Khan family kitchen—Persian and North Indian cuisines are, as the sitarist notes, radically different. But the two countries share a common musical heritage, which Khan ascribes to the traders of the Silk Road, a once-thriving social network powered by camel travel rather than cable transmission.

“I think the music came through the caravans, with the language and the cultures from the Middle East, or at least from Persia,” says Khan. “I could be totally wrong, but I think this is how it must have happened.”

Over time, he adds, the two cultures diverged. “Here, music is in a state of constant research, and that research is spreading in many different directions,” he says. “There, Islam thought for a long time that music was haram, was wrong. But in this country, it’s considered to be a wonderful part of your spirituality.”

Nonetheless, the musical systems of the two regions have retained their similarities. The Iranian dastgah, or scale, known as Esfahan, for instance, uses the same notes as the North Indian raga kirwani; only the inflections are different. The Iranian lute known as the setar is arguably the precursor of Khan’s sitar, while Kalhor’s kamancheh, a kind of spike fiddle, sounds very much like the Indian sarangi. Beyond these correspondences, however, Khan and Kalhor’s trio Ghazal, in which they’re joined by percussionist Sandeep Das, depends primarily on the kind of rapport that can’t be taught.

“We got our instruments together and we said hello, walked into the empty apartment of a friend in Los Angeles, and then we just played open music for about an hour,” Khan recalls of their first meeting. “The next time we met, we went straight into the studio and finished our first CD that day.

“Now,” he adds, “when we’re together, we laugh and we talk and we eat and we go shopping and we gossip, but we don’t talk much about music. If we really have to think about music and preplan our concerts so much, that means that we haven’t done enough work to become good musicians. With us, it’s very, very natural—and that’s how musicians should be.”

Ghazal plays West Vancouver’s Kay Meek Centre next Friday (March 13).