Wednesday, 18 December 2024
Wednesday, 18 December 2024
In his autobiography, jazz legend Miles Davis wrote that the best feeling he had had with his clothes on was when he first heard Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker play together. In the unlikely event of me ever writing mine, I would like to steal that line for a concert in Durgapur by Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma and Ustad Zakir Hussain.
On Sunday night as everyone from Rahul Gandhi to Mamata Banerjee declared Hussain dead before there was any official confirmation from anyone close to the tabla maestro, my mind was racing back in time to that evening.
It was 1987 or ’88. I had been bundled off to Durgapur. There was an event that I had to go to with the family because my father was the chief guest. I hated being taken away from my world in Kolkata. To make things worse, it was to be an evening of classical music, which the 12 or 13 year old me was sure would be even worse than the Rabindrasangeet I was force-fed by my father and sister’s singing.
My plan was to go off to sleep. But we were in the front row. I was like, challenge accepted. Two handsome men took the stage.
By the time they finished, I was like a porcupine with gooseflesh, eyes wide open. I don’t remember what they played; I remember how it felt. It was like a portal being opened. Like a new part of my brain being activated. It was an aur-gasm – discovering a new dimension of aural pleasure.
When I was on the stage after the concert, the two men seemed to be radiating a halo as they greeted everyone. It was my first encounter with the radiance that only the greatest musicians have.
I have felt it since – when I met people like Pandit Ravi Shankar, Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Derek Trucks – but it was my first time then.
I had the pleasure of watching Ustad Zakir Hussain play multiple times after that, including with Shakti – the band that first successfully and masterfully fused the East and the West – and some of his annual concerts for his father, Ustad Alla Rakha, at Shanmukhananda Hall in Mumbai.
And Zakir Hussain always opened new portals.
It is because of people like him that the world opened up to Indian music and musicians. He started out with the best – at age 7, when the sarod maestro Ustad Ali Akbar Khan let him play along at an event, as Zakir would later recall – and it was at that league he forever remained.
When he met John McLaughlin in the late 1960s through a shopkeeper at New York’s Greenwich Village, Zakir Hussain was the jazz guitar giant’s Indian vocal music teacher. After Zakir and McLaughlin played together at Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s home, they changed music forever with Shakti, the fusion supergroup that also included Vikku Vinaikram on the ghatam and L. Shankar on the violin.
It would have other people later lending their own unique sound, like the late mandolin magician U. Srinivas, but Shakti was always about the magic of McLaughlin and Zakir.
Their friendship was like globalisation done right – the British master embracing Indian food, spirituality and meters to make music with the tabla prodigy who was as comfortable in jeans as in a kurta-pajama, as well versed with pentatonic patterns of rock-n-roll as the intricacies of every raga.
With Zakir Hussain’s passing, the world has lost another of the last batch of giants that defined a new India, confident of her roots and ready to spread her branches to embrace the best of the world.
Because he was part of a syncretic – and endangered – tradition that views music as an offering to the supreme being regardless of form.
When his father first held him, Zakir Hussain had recalled in an interview, Alla Rakha had instead of whispering prayers in the newborn’s ear mouthed a rhythm pattern. Zakir’s mother was flabbergasted but the senior tabla maestro, a devout Muslim, said it was his prayer to Saraswati and Ganesh.
This was no wearing of secularism on sleeve, this was part of life. Ali Akbar Khan used to give a Hindu name every time he visited Puri’s Jagannath Temple and was asked. Sometimes, the gatekeepers would ask the father’s name as well. He had a father’s name ready, too.
Theirs was also a school of tradition unafraid of change. Zakir Hussain always recalled with gratitude how his father let him hang out with the likes of the Grateful Dead in their heydays when Zakir was just a teenager. How he was the Indian kid blasting Light My Fire on his boombox. And a friend who interviewed Zakir Hussain last year recalled how the maestro had spoken about making teasers for Instagram.
Ustad Zakir Hussain did not suffer fools gladly. Many a concert organiser will recall a finicky performer meticulous about details and about having things exactly the way he wanted it. Those who thrive on that kind of gossip might also remember him pushing away the microphone in front of his tabla, irked with his volume being lowered as he played with another legend, and never playing with that legend after that.
But that was Zakir Hussain. Flamboyant, rooted, traditional, pioneering.
As his fingers fall silent, there will be many, many tributes from stalwarts across the globe. My tribute to him is insignificant, but Ustad Zakir Hussain did change my life that night in Durgapur.
Since then, the music never stopped. Bridge of Sighs on loop carried me across my first heartbreak. Mind Ecology had me scoping up bits of my consciousness blown to smithereens with the possibility of what music can be. Come On Baby Dance With Me played when I felt happy. And it was because of Zakir Hussain that I got to see stalwart musicians like Bela Fleck and Terry Bozio in Mumbai.
For that I am forever grateful. And I am sure I am not alone.
