The year is 2013. The location, Thiruvaiyaru in Thanjavur, the venue of a historic annual music festival honouring poet-composer Thyagaraja. It is the 150th year of the festival and an electrifying musical exchange is unfurling on the stage. Tabla maestro Zakir Hussain and thavil wizard Haridwaramangalam AK Palanivel are having a lively conversation on stage – but only their drums speak.
In the days following his death, bereaved admirers of Hussain’s have found solace in trawling the treasure trove of his works online. One video that has resurfaced to find a second round of viral viewership is his nearly hour-long jugalbandi with Palanivel.
Technically it is a trigalbandi, a trio, because the late mandolin genius U Srinivas is on the stage too. But after about 10 minutes he has ceded ground to the two drummers for some expansive play. And it turns out to be a joyous rhythm riot, marked by fun, fervour and incredible energy.
You could not have found two more dramatically disparate drums or musicians for a dialogue – the thavil is a resoundingly loud Carnatic instrument, mostly used to accompany the nadaswaram at outdoor ritual and festive celebrations, while the Hindustani tabla is a concert hall instrument, soft toned and rounded. The thavil lives on the far margins of the concert circuit and the tabla is a staple of it. One musician is the toast of the global circuit, the other’s brilliance is not acknowledged enough.
But none of it mattered in those magical 50 minutes of celebration of rhythm.
Today, as he grieves the death of his collaborator and friend, Palanivel has one abiding regret. Since he speaks only Tamil, conversation with Hussain was impossible. For over four decades they made music together on various forums, not exchanging one word. “It hurts that all the years he was alive I could not talk to him and today when he is no more I am asked to speak about him,” he said, trying to articulate his sorrow. “But music does not really have a mozhi (language), does it? And the kannakku (math of rhythm) is universal. And his was impeccable.”
Rhythm bridged the cultural distance in Hussain’s collaborations with Carnatic artistes going back to the 1960s when he was just a teen. At age 16, he joined a quartet of master musicians for one of the inaugural concerts of the National Centre for Performing Arts in Bombay, says mridangam musician Anantha R Krishnan, who also studied the tabla under Hussain. The quartet included Krishnan’s grandfather and guru, Palghat Raghu, Alla Rakha and Ravi Shankar.
Over the decades, there were few Carnatic drums Hussain did not play with, from the mridangam to the drums on the periphery – the kanjira and thavil, and of course the ghatam with his Shakti teammate and buddy, Vikku Vinayakram. In one viral video he can be seen clowning around with Vinayakram and their Shakti bandmate John McLaughlin using bols.
“It took him just seconds to understand a genre and minutes to become a part of it,” said Patri Suresh Kumar, a leading mridangam player. “He was phenomenal because he had a very early understanding of Carnatic rhythm. Today we live in a digital age and are exposed to everything across cultures. But imagine this in the ’60s. He foresaw the importance of working with Carnatic rhythm but to my mind he is the embodiment of the idea of rhythm, no matter what the genre.”
Poles apart
It is not that Hussain was the first Hindustani musician to close the chasm between the northern and southern music systems. There are records of Hindustani musicians in darbars of the south and carrying back Carnatic influences. In the 1960s, Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan actively fed their curiosity about Carnatic music, playing with, and inviting, southern musicians to western platforms and interacting creatively with them.
But the percussive systems stayed poles apart. Hussain’s father, the great Alla Rakha, did collaborate with the Palghat legends but the exchanges were few and far between. It was Hussain who worked extensively with an array of Carnatic percussive instruments and did so often.
After Palghat Raghu and Mani Iyer, Hussain’s biggest step into the south came with Vikku Vinayakram, who had been invited to play with Shakti, the trailblazing fusion quartet of the 1970s. Hussain talks of the impudence of the experiment, its fearless thumbing of nose at the north-south divide that many considered unbridgeable. And the fact that they got away with it because the team’s work was happening in the West, far from the scrutiny of the purists at home.
“He speaks Tamil and I speak Hindi, so we have to talk in English, eh Viku? But he is the best drummer in the world.” A much younger Hussain and Vinayakram are exchanging banter in a 1977 promotional video of Shakti featuring what would today be called BTS shots. Hussain ribs him, a vegetarian, about playing the ghatam made with clay that has several elements including egg shells. “I am vegetarian, my drum is non-vegetarian,” the Carnatic musician shoots back.
Vinayakram talks of his trepidation at being wooed to join Shakti in 1974. He held a job at the All India Radio orchestra and leaping into a mad project with a bunch of reckless musicians seemed like suicide. But he was tempted. “He lands up at 7.30 am with his father and cousin,” Hussain says in the promotional video. “And he has a box with what he called ghatam and all I knew was that it was a south Indian drum. I had never heard of it. But then he played it so beautifully, and then we played together and it was like we had always done this.”
It was an association that was to last till Vinayakram chose to pull out to be replaced by his son, Selvaganesh, who plays the kanjira. By then, Hussain had dipped his feet in every kind of Carnatic percussive possibility. And every time he played with an artiste he put an instrument on the global map – including the humble thavil and kanjira.
“In the Thiruvayaru video, you see Zakirbhai is pushing Palanivel, seemingly willing to play second fiddle,” said writer and musician S Anand. “He has no airs, there is no competition – it is pure surrender to the joy of rhythm. His genius lay in recognising Palanivel’s genius, in his ability to have that playful approach to music, which all great musicians have. It never fades with age.”
Palanivel performed first with Hussain in Delhi, toured Japan with him and was also invited to perform at the birth anniversary of his father Alla Rakha in Bombay. Their connection as percussionists was easy, says the thavil musician. “I would think of things to play that he could enjoy interpreting on his tabla and he in turn enthused me, though our instruments were worlds apart. He was a complete artiste, he understood all styles of music but he also thought about how to connect with the audiences.”
Above all, what his fellow musicians miss about him is his kindness and generosity of spirit that did not differentiate between the young and the old, the famous and unknown, familiar and foreign.
Every year, from 2006 till 2014, Anantha Krishnan would attend the summer tabla workshops that Hussain held in California. The youngster was basically training in mridangam but it was critical for him to seek this tutelage. “My goal was to understand his musicality and that highest level of aesthetic experience not only for percussion but for all of Indian music,” he said. “After that our relationship grew – we played in ensembles, and in the past few years it became a friendly mentorship. He was one of a kind. And the thing that has touched me and all of us was the relentless humanity he had inside him.”
Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.
