OPENING MUSIC
On a winter night in Kolkata I was listening to an open air concert featuring tabla maestro Bickram Ghosh at the stately Indian Museum. Ghosh could play not just the tabla but his own body parts
BODY PARTS MUSIC
That night Ghosh’s wizardry and easy chatty style reminded us of the tabla guru of them all Zakir Hussain. Probably the most iconic tabla player to come out of India.
Barely two days later I heard Zakir Hussain had died in San Francisco.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
Zakir Hussain was among the last of the golden generation that included Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and with his baby face and mop of hair he was the Peter Pan of them all.
Zakir Hussain’s father Alla Rakha was a master tabla player who often played with Ravi Shankar. Alla Rakha could be said to have made the tabla player a star, not just an accompanist to the stars.
And Zakir Hussain made that star shine in the west.
He didn’t just play with sitar and sarod players or do percussion concerts. He played with musicians like Mickey Hart and the Grateful Dead. As he told NDTV a few years ago
ZH1: I always wondered if my father actually knew what he was doing when he told Mickey Hart, take my son with you. Did he even realize what Grateful Dead culture was? Those are the guys who invented acid.
But he was on a different high.
ZH2: the excitement of having Carlos Santana there, Jerry Garcia there, John Cipollina there, David Crosby, Gracie Sledge, Stephen Stills, all these great musicians all at the same time hanging about and of course, playing music. I remember once we played music four and a half days at a stretch, non-stop.
The likes of Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Chitresh Das, Alla Rakha all made California a hotspot for Indian classical music. Hussain told me while Indian classical music had many virtuosos they learned packaging and presentation from the west. And they got recognized back home in India as a conqueror of the West.
It also made California a home away from for Indian immigrants like me. We could drive to San Rafael and take a class in the Ali Akbar College of Music with the beautiful image of the Goddess Saraswati, goddess of arts and music in its window. Or go to an SFjazz concert and hear Zakir Hussain at play. As when he opened it post pandemic with percussionist friends.
SFJAZZ
And the great talent of Zakir Hussain was that he was so open to the many musical cross currents he was exposed to in California and beyond. He could play hardcore Indian classical solo, act in films like Heat and Dust, compose soundtracks for others and tour the world with the global fusion band Shakti. They just did a 50th anniversary tour last year that brought them to India as well.
SHAKTI
And Zakir Hussain just kept going. He’d won three Grammys this year alone. As he told NDTV he didn’t think he’d reached the pinnacle where it would feel right to hang up his drums.
ZH3: The quest is always to get better. I haven't, as a quote said by a great maestro at one time, played, uh, good enough to quit.
But most of all in a polarized world these were musicians who existed just for their music. When his friend the musician Shiv Kumar Sharma died, Zakir Hussain showed up the cremation. Many commented that this epitomized the idea of India, a Muslim ustad bidding farewell to a Hindu maestro.
But to me it wasn’t about Hindu-Muslim at all. As he stood in front of Sharma’s funeral pyre, alone, dressed in white, his arms folded I saw just one master musician saying goodbye to another. Just as years ago Ravi Shankar had chartered a plane to fly down to say goodbye to Zakir Hussain’s father Alla Rakha.
It was their way of holding the music close, as if holding onto that last note even as it faded into nothingness.
Music can’t work miracles Zakir Hussain told the Jaipur Literature Festival once. But it can offer a reprieve.
ZH4: Musicians cannot change the world in the blink of an eye. But when you come to a concert and sit down to listen to them for that two or three hours all the worries of the world are forgotten.
We will miss him.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.