Tabla maestro Ustad Zakir Hussain was laid to rest in San Francisco in an intimate ceremony on Thursday in which family, friends and admirers of the legendary musician paid their last respects.
“It was a beautiful, secular gathering with Buddhist monks, Sufis, Sikhs… Close friends living close by mostly,” said Souvik Dutta, who co-produced the album by Shakti that won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Global Music Album.
Dutta, who manages Shakti, is a long-time collaborator with Zakir Hussain and British jazz guitar legend John McLaughlin.
John McLaughlin, left, Ganesh Rajagopalan and Souvik Dutta in Kolkata in January 2020
Shakti was founded when Hussain and McLaughlin played together at the home of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan in the early 1970s. The pioneering supergroup in many ways opened the doors for what is called world music.
“Bob Weir sang Ripple with Mickey [Hart] beating on drums,” Dutta told The Telegraph Online.
Zakir Hussain and the Grateful Dead go back a long way. The tabla maestro had recalled in many interviews how his father, the table legend Alla Rakha, allowed him to hang out with bands like the Grateful Dead who defined the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury hippie movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Mickey Hart, percussionist with the Grateful Dead, called Zakir Hussain “my brother for over 50 years, my closest collaborator, and my dearest friend”.
PTI
When Hussain passed away, Hart wrote:
“Over the years we have shared places reserved only for those whose lives are totally engulfed by drums.”
Ripple, written by the late Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, Robert Hunter, is one of the most lyrical, poignant and yet uplifting songs the Dead ever wrote.
Percussionist Sivamani and other artistes also performed on their drums at a little distance away in a tribute to the tabla maestro in San Francisco on Thursday, PTI reported.
Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of the world’s most accomplished percussionists, died at a San Francisco hospital on Monday due to complications arising from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease. He was 73.
