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SF Season : 25th Anniversary Season : Information on Zakir Hussain
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Tabla music began as dancing music, in Northern Indian courts in the early 1700s, and its hypnotic intensity and complex rhythms convey the strong feeling that they are meant to move the body. There is an enthralling quality to the cyclical, accentual repetitions of rhythms that have been handed down from master to student in the six major gharanas, or stylistic traditions, of tabla music. Between the two drums that make up the tabla --- the smaller dayan on the right, and the bayan on the left --- percussive resonance and rhythmic interplay come together like a song, so that tabla music sometimes sounds more like a melody than a series of drumbeats. |
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Zakir Hussain, son of the legendary tabla player Ustad Alla Rakha, belongs to the Punjab Gharana, but has chosen to create music with an array of artists from the Karnatic tradition of Southern India, the international Silk Road Project, and Western drummers such as Mickey Hart. He began touring before he was twelve years old, and has received numerous awards over the course of his illustrious career in world music, including a Grammy for his collaborative album, Planet Drum. This is his third collaboration with Alonzo King, following Who Dressed You Like A Foreigner in 1998 and Following the Subtle Current Upstream, which premiered in 2000 in the repertory of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and was brought into LINES Ballet's repertory in 2006. The tabla, with its rich texture of rhythmic patterns, is the main form of percussion in the Hindustani music of North India, but its origins also reveal the interconnections of musical history. In fact, the Hindi and Urdu word tabla is derived from an Arabic word for drum, and even further back from Aramaic and Middle Persian roots. The tabla bridges folk, semi-classical, and classical Hindustani music genres, and was intrinsic to the lost dances of the tawaif-s, who performed in 18th-century courts. This collaboration between Alonzo King and Zakir Hussain is thus both a continuation of a deep tradition --- the interdependence of dance and tabla music as art forms --- and an expression of the contemporary global vision of both artists. The complex rhythmic systems of tabla, like the technique of western classical ballet, demand the devotion and utter concentration of the artists who practice them; and yet, at the heart of the music and the dance, there is a sense of openness, of arising in joy, of soaring beyond the structures and being held there, aloft. |