South Asian music is primarily improvisitional and dialogical. With his tremendous depth and saturation in the the South Asian classical musical traditions and form Zakir Hussain is able to weave a musical tapestry that has an indelibly South Asian look and feel yet not foreign to the African or North American jazz sensibilities. From the time of his collaboration with John McLaughlin, Zakir has continued to seek collaboration with musicians of unfathomable depth. Of course, his father the late great Ustad Alla Rakha had accompanied musicians from Ravi Shankar to George Harrison. Zakir's "Master of Percussion" concerts are like a trip to a single-malt whisky library and the attendant tasting of malts. You get smoky to fruity to iodine to liquorice and everything in between. A mind numbing yet constantly inspiring array of sounds issued from the incredible control of digits, of palms, of wrists. South Asian percussion is indeed like the confluence of rivers, gritty and clear, dark and light, but we know sooner or later it would adopt many shades and then meander into a peaceful flow. Indeed its birth at the intersection of mind and movement. Every tap, every click, every rub, every scratch contributes to every sigh we inevitably draw in awe of the magic.
The evening at the Chan Centre, the University of British Columbia Campus, began with a bang as Ningombam Joy Singh a Manipuri dancing drummer demonstrated his uncanny ability to unite mind and motion. Sufficiently dazzled, we then found ourselves deep inside the rhythms of Ghatam, a clay-pot whose utilitarian raison d’etre is holding of liquids. Peasants would bring in milk or other drink to the farm in ghatam, during their rare breaks would use it as a percussion instrument. South Asia has over 200 percussions instruments and we heard quite a few during the evening. Dholak is a lateral two-sided drum. The legend has it that a 13th century Indian poet, musician and scholar Amir Khusrow, invented tabla by cutting dholak into two parts that sit upright. The penultimate offering for the evening was a mesmerizing, deeply introspective, and meditative conversational piece, a duet between the great Zakir’s tabla and an emerging flute-maestro Rakesh Chaurasia’s bansuri. The evening melted into an amazing symphony of rhythm when Zakir was joined by seven percussion geniuses.
