Oddly enough, it was “Black Mountain Side,” an acoustic guitar piece from Led Zepellin’s first album, which turned me on to the exquisite sound of the tabla. “Tabla drum?” I asked myself. “What in the world is a tabla drum?” I ignorantly imagined some sort of table which the player beat on—until I checked a Beatles’s anthology book which depicted brightly clad George Harrison sitting placidly in the midst of sitar master Ravi Shankar and an unidentified tabla player. (“Love You To,” from the Beatles’s 1966 Revolver album, was Harrison’s first recorded attempt at Indian music. Before Revolver, most Westerners knew nothing at all of East Indian music or culture.) Instead of tables, the drums looked like small kettles. But the picture did little to quench my curiosity about the queer-sounding foreign instrument. This urge eventually moved me to San Francisco where I studied with table master Zakir Hussain. Since […]

November 1982 Issue