Listening to Zakir Hussain discuss his charmed life as a professional musician is like floating along with one of his rhapsodic tabla improvisations.
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When you ask a question, he lays out the basic outlines of a response, adding flourishes, digressions and important secondary themes, such as a lengthy — but fascinating — elucidation of the “Ravi Shankar Syndrome” that grabbed hold of the Indian music scene in the 1970s and kept other worthy players from getting their fair share of attention.
Even the subject of today’s interview — his upcoming performance with Niladri Kumar, one of India’s young sitar lions, as part of Wesleyan University’s 34th annual Navaratri Festival — turns out to be a secondary theme in a richer narrative. What’s really interesting is the story of how Hussain and like-minded musicians pioneered the fusion of Hindustani and Carnatic musical traditions with Western jazz and rock over the course of three decades, laying the groundwork for what we now call world music. And just as a fragment of rhythm often gleans insight into the fabric of an extended composition, Wesleyan’s not insignificant role is crucial to understanding that story as well.
Hussain began lessons with father, tabla legend Ustad Allarakha, at age 3. A self-described tabla brat, the young prodigy soon impressed everyone with his formidable technique, playing his first American gig with Ravi Shankar at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York in 1970. Hired by the University of Washington later that year, Hussain heard the Balinese gamelan, Chinese classical music, and exotic African rhythms for the first time.
The limits of his knowledge became palpable; when he returned to Mumbai for a visit, Allarakha cemented the young man’s fresh sense of humility as Hussain tried to awe his father with his new experiences. The father’s muted response — That’s great, but don’t try to be a master; always be a good student and you’ll get by just fine — struck a chord in the young player, one that continues to resonate.
Hussain returned stateside with a new attitude, finding work at the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music, a school started near San Francisco by Khan, the South Indian sarod master. Between 1972 and 1981, Hussain rubbed shoulders with a host of free-spirited musicians — Mickey Hart and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, David Crosby, Carlos Santana, Alejandro Escovedo, Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, and members of Big Brother and the Holding Company and Journey — who gravitated to the college. They shared his love of learning, his desire to interact with musicians from traditions other than his own, and his incessant need to jam.
“It was an interesting time and it led to many interesting collaborations,” Hussain remembers. “San Francisco and New York seemed to be the two areas where musicians kind of, you know, hung out, and this was the area where I was the only Indian percussionist available to play with, and got a chance that I think was the chance of a lifetime.”
Wesleyan, meanwhile, was the East Coast equivalent of the Khan College, a veritable hotbed of ethnomusicological studies, drawing students and masters of Indian music from all over the globe to Middletown. One eager student was English guitarist John McLaughlin, who had already established himself as a virtuoso on recordings with Miles Davis and his own fusion band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra. McLaughlin traveled from New York to study veena, a classical Hindu lute, at Wesleyan, where he ran into the South Indian violinist L. Shankar, the nephew of McLaughlin’s veena teacher. The two decided immediately to start a band with the visiting Hussain and percussionist T.H. “Vikku” Vinayakram. The quartet became known as Shakti, arguably the first world music fusion group and one of the genre’s most successful. “It all came out of one little coffee shop on the Wesleyan campus,” Hussain says.
Shakti disbanded, but Hussain went on playing. He collaborated with Hart on the Planet Drum project; the duo won the first Best World Music Grammy award in 1992. In 2000, Hussain’s Tabla Beat Science, an electronica project he started with Material’s Bill Laswell, brought the tabla into the new millennium. Hussain, along with banjo player Béla Fleck and double bassist Edgar Meyer, recently released an album of original compositions called The Melody of Rhythm.
Hussain doesn’t distinguish between collaborators and friends. He e-mails Fleck and Meyer when he discovers a good recipe for shrimp curry. Their families exchange books and check out new restaurants together. “When you interact,” he explains, “you don’t just put two or three or four great musicians together and say, ‘OK, now make music.’ There’s more to it than that. Music is one part of it. Meeting, interacting, getting to know each other, being friends with each other, opening your hearts to each other … you have to be able to interact and communicate on all levels of relationship. And the juice of it all needs to appear in your music.”
Kumar is no exception. “I see myself in him 30 years ago,” Hussain says. “He is probably the finest sitar exponent of his age coming out of India.”
