“I believe that music is the perfect medium to express emotion”, he explains. “In the music of South Asia, each piece (raag) embodies a particular mood, season, or time of day. In every performance I try to use the music and the instrument to capture the feeling in my heart and to convey this to my audience, so that they can feel in that moment what I am feeling. If I succeed in this, the music seems to take on a life of its own, moving me, and, I hope, the audience.”

Ustad Ashraf Sharif Khan was born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan and is arguably one of the best sitar players in the world at this time. He is the son of sitar maestro Ustad Muhammad Sharif Khan Poonchwala, who enjoyed a renown in Pakistan and India equal to Ustad Vilayat Khan and Pandit Ravi Shankar. Like his father, Ashraf Sharif Khan belongs to the illustrious Poonch Gharana, a Gharana for traditional sitar, and received his primary music education from his father.

Ashraf's music combines an astonishing technical proficiency with perfection in musical expression. The melodic beauty of his style, accentuated by his dynamic rhythmic development and the virtuoso technique produce a unique musical experience, equally appreciable to novices and connoisseurs of South Asian music. His music transcends regional boundaries, and is accessible to all. He has made unique innovations to the Sitar instrument making the sound more resonant and making tuning while performing easier. This version of the Sitar is now known as the Ashraf Sharif Khan version. 

Following his first public performance at the age of eleven, Ashraf toured throughout Pakistan. In 1990, he was awarded the Khwaja Khurshid Anwar Prize and the Hazrat Amir Khusran Prize. In 1992, he was chosen to represent Pakistan at the International Sound Celebration Festival in Louisville, Kentucky (USA). In 1997, he received the Colombo University KelaniyaAward (Sri Lanka). In 1999, he performed at the prestigious Medina Festival in Tunis, at the Sugar Hall in Okinawa, Japan, at the Symphony Space in New York, and at the Cairo Opera House in Egypt.

Since 1990 Ustad Ashraf Sharif Khan has mainly lived in Hamburg and Oslo. He is a regular component of the annual festival of the All Pakistan Music Conference in Lahore. He has performed in various European cities alongside many international musicians led to new projects in the areas of jazz and world music. This includes works done with with Terlog Gurthu, Nasil Shama and TinaTandler. Ashraf has appeared at numerous festivals worldwide including Arabesque in Montpellier, Monde Arabe in Montreal, Oslo Mela World Festival, Fusion inNeustrelitz, Oberjazz in Hamburg, Kharky in Tunis,Tahzeeb. He has also been a frequent guest on Norwegian, British and Pakistani television and radio, starred in the film Enzo Avitabile Music Life (2012) by Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme, andreleased four studio and live albums. He teaches classical South Asian music at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo.

More recently, in 2016 he was awarded with the Lifetime Achievement award from the All Pakistan Music Conference in Pakistan and in 2017 he was awarded with the Pride of Performance award, one of the highest national awards in Pakistan awarded by the President for his contributions to music.