The great tabla master and cross-genre musical innovator Zakir Hussain has died at age 73. Read the BBC obituary here. Bill Milkowski wrote about Hussain for the magazine in 2009 here.
Hussain became known to jazz audiences worldwide mainly through his association with guitarist John McLaughlin’s acoustic fusion group Shakti. Here’s a 1977 documentary about the band:
Here is Shakti’s Tiny Desk Concert from just last year:
Here is Jazz Night in America’s full coverage of Hussain’s recent collaboration with bassist Dave Holland:
My only live sightings of Hussain were with Remember Shakti at The Town Hall around 2001, and several years later at Zankel Hall—probably the same show Bill wrote about—with Charles Lloyd’s Sangam project, featuring Eric Harland on drums. The last time I saw Hussain was on film, much to my surprise: he had a cameo role as an unnamed tabla player in Dev Patel’s 2024 directorial debut, Monkey Man.
Those scenes have gone viral in the wake of Hussain’s death. They’re fine, but they only begin to hint at his significance and the scope of his skills. Son of the late tabla master Alla Rakha (1919-2000), Hussain and his instrument “became the embodiment of playful exuberance and exhilarating joy,” wrote David Harrington of Kronos Quartet. He played “what seemed like impossible melodic, rhythmic cascades.” He “grabbed patterns from the hidden physics of music … his sense of the beat made a metronome sound uneven and somehow off-kilter.”
That last bit from Harrington underscores how Hussain and jazz musicians could so readily make common cause. His work with Shakti on A Handful of Beauty and Natural Beauty was a revelation; I wore out my home-taped cassette copies. But the most jaw-dropping Hussain, to me, is him playing what we might call “straightahead”—deep in the classical Hindustani tradition, as in this early clip:
About halfway through you’ll see Hussain gesture with his head, either side to side or downward. If I’m not mistaken, he’s “keeping tala” for himself, marking the rhythmic subdivisions as he plays, something I saw McLaughlin do for Hussain at The Town Hall show.
Here he is, vamping while Ali Akbar Khan pauses to change a sarod string, then cueing the start of the next rhythmic cycle with great flair:
What an improviser. Finally, here is a short video of Hussain collaborating with sought-after jazz drummer Marcus Gilmore:
Drummer and Red Baraat bandleader Sunny Jain spoke for many on Threads when he wrote the following: “One of the greatest musicians to ever grace this planet. Zakir ji is why I play drums.”
On Instagram, John McLaughlin wrote: “The King, in whose hands rhythm became magic, has left us. RIP my dearest Zakir, we will meet again.”
