Celebrating tabla master
In music as in real estate, three factors are primary: location, location and location. Even as the digital revolution continues to shrink the global village, there’s no gainsaying the power of physical proximity. For tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, scion of North Indian music’s greatest percussion dynasty, the move from Mumbai to Marin County in the early 1970s opened up vast new musical realms for exploration, and no relationship has played a more essential role in his journey than SFJazz.
Over three decades, since its first years as Jazz in the City, the organization has presented Hussain with an ever expanding cast of collaborators, from jazz saxophone legends and Latin American percussionists to Carnatic violinists and masters of traditional Celtic music (a two-night SFJazz Center encounter documented on his 2015 album “Distant Kin”).
He credits SFJazz founder Randall Kline with providing a conceptual framework “that made it possible to discover things that I could be a part of seamlessly, and still maintain my identity,” says Hussain, 65. “That’s why the relationship has blossomed into one of the greatest sources of learning for me. It’s allowed people to look at me in a different light, as not only a classical Indian tabla player but a percussionist at large.”
Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, who recruited Hussain for his Grammy Awardwinning Planet Drum ensemble, presents Hussain with the SFJazz Lifetime Achievement Award as part of the
SFJazz Gala on Wednesday, Jan. 18. The event kicks off SFJazz Center’s fifth season, and features performances by a glittering cast of jazz stars, including the eight-piece SFJazz Collective, saxophonist Joe Lovano, guitarist Bill Frisell and trumpeter Terence Blanchard.
These musicians are also performing in a series of SFJazz tributes for jazz greats who called the Bay Area home. Cindy Blackman Santana serves as music director for the Tony Williams concert Thursday, Jan. 19. Stefon Harris oversees the homage to Bobby Hutcherson event Friday, Jan. 20. Joshua Redman organized the Saturday, Jan. 21 event for the San Francisco tenor sax titan Joe Henderson, and Miguel Zenón is music director for the Sunday, Jan. 22 celebration of John Handy, who’s still going strong at 83 years old.
A supremely curious and resourceful artist, Hussain would have thrived wherever he settled, but the Bay Area provided particularly fertile soil for a musician and composer eager to connect with musicians outside classical Indian circles. Even before Kline launched Jazz in the City in 1983 Hussain had already performed with alto saxophonist Handy, and co-founded the pioneering Indo-jazz ensemble Shakti with British guitarist John McLaughlin.
Still, when Kline approached him about performing a duo show with Henderson at Grace Cathedral in 1990, Hussain wasn’t confident that the concert would succeed. Kline assured him, saying, “I know this is going to work,” Hussain recalls, and the evening sparked an epiphany. The first of several Sacred Spaces concerts he performed for SFJazz, the performance ushered Hussain into the intricacies of jazz’s harmonic landscapes, 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 says. “And, with John Handy, I was with 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 down beat 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.”
Though the encounters weren’t as fateful,
A supremely curious and resourceful artist, Hussain would have thrived wherever he settled, but the Bay Area provided particularly fertile soil.
Hussain crossed paths with all of the jazz greats SFJazz is celebrating, and he’ll also be performing at the tributes. For several years he’d get together occasionally with Williams for tea when the drummer lived close to the San Anselmo home Hussain shares with his wife, dancer Antonia Minnecola.
He also spent time with Hutcherson in Marin, jamming at the Sleeping Lady in Fairfax as part of a loose confederation of players exploring Afro-Cuban grooves in the mid-’70s when Hussain “was experimenting away from tabla, playing bongos and timbales,” he says. “We never got to record, but in those intimate gatherings we got to hang.”
He has the deepest ties with Handy, but won’t be in town for the Jan. 22 concert, as he’s flying to India to start rehearsing with a new all-star band featuring bassist Dave Holland and saxophonist Chris Potter.
SFJazz isn’t the only institution eager to present Hussain’s music, of course. In April he premieres his new concerto “Peshkar” with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.