Zakir Hussain, one of India’s most respected classical musicians, died on Sunday in San Francisco at the age of 73. Thanks to his fruitful collaborations with Western musicians, especially guitarist John McLaughlin and ex-Beatles George Harrison, Indian classical music – and especially the percussion instrument tabla – reached the world’s leading stages. TASR informs about it based on the report of the AP agency.
Zakir Hussain died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis – a chronic lung disease – at a San Francisco hospitalhis family said in a statement cited by the AP agency. Born in Mumbai in 1951, he was destined for a musical career right from childhood: his father was Alla Rakha (1919-2000), who played tabla drums with the legendary sitarist Ravi Shankar.
Zakir Hussain started performing in India at the age of 12. It was introduced to an international audience by drummer Mickey Hart from the Greateful Dead, who invited the father and son Hussains to record the Rolling Thunder album in 1972.
A year later, George Harrison invited Zakir Hussain to record his fourth solo album, Living in the Material World, which was released in 1973. In the same year, Hussain founded the Indian jazz fusion group Shakti with jazz guitarist John McLaughlin. which played acoustic fusion music, combining Indian music with elements of jazz, introducing a new sound to Western audiences. The ensemble toured world stages for five years, releasing three albums in 1976 and 1977.
20 years later, Hussain and McLaughlin came up with a new form of orchestra called Remembering Shakti. In another form, Shakti presented herself in 2020 and in 2023 – after a 46-year hiatus – she offered her fans the fourth album This Moment, which won this prestigious award in three categories at the last Grammy music awards ceremony. Hussain received his first Grammy Award in 2009.
Zakir Hussain’s discography includes over a hundred albums; this charismatic virtuoso recorded with L. Shankar, composer and saxophonist Jan Garbarek, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, bassist Bill Laswell, and jazzmen Dave Holland, Chris Potter and Charles Lloyd.
Zakir Hussain has also written a number of film scores – including the score for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, 1993. He even acted in movies. In his last appearance, he played himself in director-actor Dev Patel’s feature film Monkey Man, which was released last spring.
Zakir Hussain can also be remembered by his fans in Slovakia – on November 5, 2014, he performed in the Big Concert Studio of the Slovak Radio in Bratislava.
