As an arts journalist who’s often gotten the chance to interview musicians I deeply admire, I’ve had cause to reflect on the adage “Never meet your heroes. They’ll surely disappoint.”
Some encounters have revealed the kernel of wisdom in this cautionary advice, but these have been the exception rather than the rule. More often, I come away impressed and elevated by my conversations with artists. And if any pedestaled figure left me feeling just that way, it was tabla legend Zakir Hussain, whose death in December 2024 at the age of 73 is still hard to comprehend.
Since the mid-1990s, across more than a dozen interviews that I conducted with him and twice that many performances in an array of musical settings that I attended, he was the musician whose presence was the most profoundly enthralling. Far more than a cross-cultural musical explorer and eloquent champion of Hindustani and Carnatic classical traditions, Hussain seemed to have a boundless capacity for supporting fellow artists.
Several tributes and celebrations in the coming days are set to highlight this extraordinary human, and recent interviews with some of the artists involved have focused and distilled my sense of Hussain’s manifold virtues.
On an artistic level, Hussain’s eagerness to stretch his creative wings in his eighth decade manifests on March 1 at Sonoma State University’s Green Music Center with the West Coast premiere of his Murmurs in Time, a two-movement work commissioned by Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion. TCP is presenting the piece with Salar Nader — a tabla virtuoso and disciple of Hussain’s. (The percussion ensemble is fresh off a triumphant West Coast run with Twyla Tharp, performing Philip Glass’s Aguas da Amazonia as the score for the choreographer’s new ballet, SLACKTIDE.)
Combining Hindustani classical music with the mallet-driven sonic world of the Grammy Award-winning TCP, Murmurs in Time is a major new addition to the percussion repertoire that came about when the ensemble reached out to Hussain two years ago to see if he’d be interesting in writing a piece for the quartet and himself to perform.
“He said it was the first time he had been asked to do something like this,” said David Skidmore, TCP percussionist and executive director. “From the beginning, he was interested in writing for marimba and vibraphones, and he sent us initial ideas: rhythmic cycles [that he communicated in] spoken syllables but also some rough tabla notation.”
The ensemble improvised using Hussain’s cycles, and he based the instrumentation for the piece on the quartet’s feedback. The first movement starts with the group singing those rhythmic figures, a percussive practice called bol in Hindustani music. The instruments — marimba, vibes, drum kit, and tabla — gradually join in, “building to a climactic moment at the end,” Skidmore said. For the second movement, singing prayer bowls and children’s tone chimes are added.
“The piece is extraordinary, and we learned so much from the project,” Skidmore said. “Of course about Hindustani classical music, of which we only had a cursory knowledge. But it was more watching his mind work, his command of rhythm and how he improvised.”
TCP released its recording of the piece, which features Hussain in one of his final performances, on Feb. 7, in advance of the ensemble’s tour with Nader. The Green Center program is also slated to include newly commissioned works by Jessie Montgomery, Tigran Hamasyan, and Jlin, as well as a solo tabla performance by Nader in honor of Hussain. The day before, the ensemble offers a Murmurs in Time preview as part of the Feb. 28 Grace Cathedral extravaganza titled “A Celebration of the Life and Music of Zakir Hussain.”
Rather than highlighting his nonpareil stature as an Indian classical artist, the sold-out program at Grace focuses on Hussain as an eager interlocutor with musicians in jazz and beyond, notably via his long-running relationship with SFJAZZ. The setting is particularly apropos, as Grace was where Hussain first performed with tenor sax great Joe Henderson as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival’s Sacred Spaces series in 1990.
Hussain had played often with saxophonist John Handy in the mid-1970s, to say nothing of the drummer’s co-founding of the pioneering Indo-jazz band Shakti with guitarist John McLaughlin during the same decade. But working duo with Henderson represented a major creative leap into the intricacies of jazz harmonies — a foreign world for a musician steeped in Hindustani modes.
“When I played with McLaughlin in Shakti, he came halfway and sat down on the riser with the Indian musicians,” Hussain told me in a 2017 interview before receiving the SFJAZZ Lifetime Achievement Award. “And with John Handy, I was [also performing] with [fellow Indian musician] Ali Akbar Khan, who oversaw what was happening. But playing with Joe threw me into the deep end and got me thinking about jazz philosophy and the downbeat and playing through the chords. In Indian music, you have one note, and you’re not thinking about the changes. That’s a discipline that jazz brings forth.”
Hussain went on to play several other Sacred Space concerts at Grace, including a 2001 encounter with saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd that planted the seeds for Sangam, their acclaimed trio with drummer Eric Harland. Lloyd and Harland are both participating in the Feb. 28 celebration, along with saxophonists George Brooks, David Sánchez, Joshua Redman, and Chris Potter; reigning banjo royalty Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn; bassists Dave Holland and Harish Raghavan; drummers Marcus Gilmore and Steve Smith; percussionists Mickey Hart and John Santos; and guitarists Julian Lage and Marvin Sewell.
The much smaller Indian contingent for the program includes several Carnatic masters: mridangam expert Anantha Krishnan, veena maestra Jayanthi Kumaresh, and violinist Ganesh Rajagopalan, artists who embody Hussain’s many endeavors building on the pioneering programming of his father, tabla legend Ustad Alla Rakha, to bring together North and South Indian musicians.
Hindustani violinist and vocalist Kala Ramnath represents the side of Hussain that will be felt offstage and for years to come. She describes him as “the angel in my life,” and when I reached her by video call in Mumbai, she was still deep in grief over his loss. Hussain was friends with her father, violinist T.N. Mani, a prominent figure in Indian film music. Ramnath was 12 when her father died, and Hussain invited her to move in with his family in Mumbai to continue her musical education.
She stayed in Chennai, but he kept close watch on her musical development, encouraging her to hone her own sound. She took his advice to heart, and when the moment was ripe, he gave her a solo spot that launched her career. At a 75th birthday celebration for sitar star Ravi Shankar in 1996, the scheduled vocalist, Shobha Gurtu, had to cancel due to illness.
“Zakir recommended me for that, and it changed my life,” said Ramnath, whose ties to Hussain led to her spending long stretches of time in the San Francisco Bay Area. She made her first U.S. tour in 1997, and their paths often intersected.
“He said, ‘You’re a musician like me,’” she recalled. “When I was straying a bit, he’d bring me on track. ‘Don’t take everything easy,’ he said. ‘You have to evolve as a musician constantly.’”
