Zakir Hussain
Global Drummer

by Michael Parillo

The world-traveling tabla maestro offers insight into the history and technique behind his instrument and talks about his hypnotic new album with Mickey Hart.

Somehow I expected Zakir Hussain’s hands to be…not normal.
 
    As I prepared to meet him, one of the most masterful drummers of our time—of any time—I thought about what he’s put those hands through. After all, stories of his monastic dedication to practicing during his training days are legendary, and the guy continues to gig constantly. The gestures used to coax music from a pair of tabla are not ostentatious, but Zakir spends great chunks of his time digging in and sliding the heel of his left hand along the goatskin head of the larger drum—called the bayan or bass—while, among many other strokes, pounding the buffalo-hide-wrapped wooden rim of the smaller drum—the dayan or simply the tabla—with his right index finger (among many other fingers). I assumed there would be some calluses, maybe a rough patch here or there.

    Nope. His hands—hands that have felt five hundred years of Indian rhythms—were absolutely smooth. He probably had calluses at some point, but he doesn’t need them anymore. At age fifty-six, after learning from his father, the great Alla Rakha (Ravi Shankar’s longtime tabla player), and performing with a United Nations–type roster of musicians in a multitude of styles, Zakir Hussain has reached a state of grace.

    “I’ve been very lucky,” he says. “The musicians I’m playing with now are the musicians I started playing with thirty years ago.” This list includes Westerners like guitarist John McLaughlin, in the group Shakti, and Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, along with Indian classical artists such as flutist Hariprasad Chaurasia and santoor (dulcimer) player Shivkumar Sharma. Like his ecstatic drumming, Zakir’s ability and desire to share his art—his own and his native country’s—is unmatched, even in an age when geographic boundaries mean less then ever. He’s a swashbuckling rhythmic explorer who’s carrying the torch passed by Ravi Shankar as the world ambassador for Indian music.

    The song of the tabla—the softly guttural, bending low tones of the bayan, the wooden crack and ringing open notes of the dayan—is familiar by now, but the nuances of Indian classical music are difficult to grasp. We drumset players might not yet be able to navigate the rules of a tala, or rhythm cycle, but we can connect instantly with Zakir’s craft—the lushness of his sound, the mischief he creates with his dizzying syncopation, the thrill of his virtuosity, the fun he’s clearly having despite employing dauntingly intricate technique. To the interested but untrained Westerner, Indian classical music, in both its visceral sense of drama and its deep, exotic sense of mystery, can reflect the rhythmic makeup of everything from rolling tides to beating hearts. As the Sufi mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan puts it in his illuminating text The Mysticism Of Sound And Music, and as Zakir himself radiates, “the very nature of life is rhythm.”

    Supporting this concept is Global Drum Project, Zakir’s new recording with Hart, congero Giovanni Hidalgo, and talking drum player Sikiru Adepoju. The group is essentially a reunion of Planet Drum, only under a new name due to legal hassles. “We wanted to use the name, more as a tribute to Olatunji,” Zakir says of his friend and Planet Drum alum. “Baba passed away in its fifteenth year, and we wanted to pay tribute. But the main thing is the rhythms it represents.” The current CD is a collection of meditative grooves that highlight a worldly mix of percussion instruments, with a twist: The sounds were processed in real time, by the players and an engineer, as they were recorded. “A simple tabla can then become a chorus of tabla or a horn section or piano,” Zakir says.

    For our interview, though, a “simple” tabla was plenty. Zakir, just back from playing at Kodo’s annual Earth Celebration in Japan, used his clear-voiced drums like an extension of his hands, to illustrate musical concepts, to take quick (jaw-dropping) breaks, and to crack jokes. At one point, I began to ask a question about “classical music.” He interrupted: “You mean…?” and played a few bars of the William Tell overture on his bass drum. He also demonstrated the wonderfully mellifluous syllabic singing that all Indian musicians learn; he’d recite a phrase such as ta ti, da ge na ti, ge na da ge na ti, and then he’d play the corresponding strokes for those syllables on the tabla. But mostly he talked. Though he has a sharp sense of humor, he wasn’t kidding when he said, “I might give two or three answers to every question.”

MD: Could you start by explaining the general role of each drum?

Zakir: Since you’re a kit player, imagine the bayan to be the bass drum holding the tempo down, and imagine the tabla to be doing the snare thing, à la Buddy Rich, and a little bit of the tom-tom or cymbal stuff. You can keep the bass going—even like a double bass [plays steady 16th-note-type pattern with two fingers]—and do all kinds of stuff over it.

    But, there’s a repertoire that has been developed for the tabla, which is somewhere between four and five hundred years old. That’s the language of the instrument. It comes from five schools, and each school has its specialty.

    We don’t separate the instruments like you would—the bass drum here and the cymbal there, and you can think about them individually. There is no pattern or phrase in tabla, which is just for the right hand or just for the left hand. It has to be both hands together. [Sings syllabic pattern, then plays it on the tabla.] I’m not just improvising—I’m actually reciting a composition that’s about 180 years old. As I say it, I play it, doing what’s his face? The guitar player who sings his solos….

MD: George Benson?

Zakir: George Benson. [laughs] The repertoire was developed not unlike the Western system, where you were commissioned to write. When the maharajas went to the forest to go hunting, they brought musicians along to entertain them at night. They see a deer skipping about, and the maharaja says to his court tabla player, “Maestro, you should compose a rhythm that’s something like this!”

    Some of the repertoire deals with the poetry of the instrument. A theme is allotted, and you are given certain do’s and don’ts—rules—to improvise on.

MD: Because you blend composition and improvisation, it’s hard for outsiders to understand what’s allowed and what isn’t. What would be a “don’t”?

Zakir: Don’t use a syllable not allotted in the composition. Ours is not a loose-fit thing. Most of it is very disciplined, worked into a compositional form.

    You must make sure that the way the phrasing is remains that way, even though you’re creating things. You can change it slightly, but within the norms: maintaining the composition and using the syllable that’s the important part of the phrase—like tete, for example. There are challenges in being able to improvise. Once you start a rhythm cycle, you see it through to the end before you change to another cycle. You don’t just change and come back. Same way in the ragas—you have the scale allotted, and you must work with that.

To read the rest of the interview with Zakir, pick up the January 2008 issue of Modern Drummer at your favorite music store, book store, or newsstand now.

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