Zakir Hussain

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #117 (April/May 2005).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Zakir Hussain

Bridging Traditions

by Peggy Latkovich

Dragging a seven-year-old child out of bed at 2:00 a.m. to practice a rigorous discipline for several hours before heading off to school sounds like the stuff of Dickens. But it's just a day in the life of a fledgling tabla player. If your father is Ustad Alla Rakha, one of India's most celebrated drummers, learning in the wee hours is all part of the game.

"I started playing when I was three years old," said Zakir Hussain, "and had my first little concert at the age of seven, about a half an hour or so. After that, my father said, 'Let the training begin.' The next thing I knew I was being awoken at two o'clock in the morning. It was fun. It was a strange time to be taught, but his logic was that it was quiet. We weren't always drumming. We spent time talking about music and learning the rhythms. Then I would go to school in the morning and come home in the afternoon and practice what I was taught at night. It was important that I have an education, so I juggled both."

Though Hussain has learned from percussionists from all over the world, his father, who died in 2000, was his only formal teacher. "Learning from him was a joy," he said, "It was a very exciting time. The only pressure was when I had to go out and give a performance onstage. When you are the son of a legendary musician, you are expected automatically to be better than anybody else, and your 'better than anybody else' is considered average, so there was pressure there. Fortunately that wasn't much of a problem because I was enjoying myself so much behind the drums. I looked forward to playing. I was a ham."

Though Ustad Alla Rakha drilled traditional Hindustani music into his son, he was tolerant of Hussain's experimentation with other forms as he grew older. "Though I was doing other things, my focus was still on the traditional forms, and all of that helped me to grow as a musician," Hussain said. "As long as I kept coming back to the classical music, he was okay. He was traveling all over the world all the time and could see that the world was opening up. He traveled throughout America and Europe and brought me records of all kinds of music -- rock, pop, jazz, classical, everything. So it was only natural that I would be curious about finding out more about it. I guess he just wanted to make sure that before I started jumping from city to city around the globe that I knew what my tradition was, where my roots lay."

[cover #117]