Confessional Interview: Zakir Hussain

Zakir Hussain, 73, on playing with the Grateful Dead and eating yoghurt with George Harrison.

Zakir Hussain, the world’s top tabla player plus musical producer, film actor and composer returns to Australia after more than a decade, to perform Triveni in Melbourne and Sydney in July.

The way that I became a leading tabla player was … because I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I got on the bus when it departed. I started at a very young age, I arrived in California right at the time when people were looking for some kind of tabla player because Ravi Shankar – the sitar maestro – and my father, Alla Rakha, who played with him were touring all over the world. They were the flavour of the month. I was living in a place where lots of music happened and people were looking for a fresh approach to music they were already masters of. People like John Coltrane and George Harrison had approached Ravi Shankar, there was this buzz about Indian music and so they found me and took me into the fold.

Two days after I was brought home from the hospital … my mother handed me to my father and he held me in his arms, put his lips to my ear and started singing rhythm syllables in my ear. My father being considered by India as the greatest percussionist of the 20th century, meant there was homeschooling when it came to music. I started at a very young age. I had nothing to say about it. By the time I was three or four years old, all the rhythms that he had sung in my ear were running helter skelter in my brain and needed an outlet. I somehow found my mother’s pots and pans and I would turn them over and I would start playing them.

At about the age of seven ... my father asked me if I wanted to do this seriously. I’d been waiting for him to utter those words. I jumped on him and said yes, of course.

Once, when I worked with the Grateful Dead … I fell asleep on the floor of a recording studio that Mickey Hart, the Grateful Dead drummer owns. I fell asleep because we had been working through the night on one of the albums. I woke up to the sound of guitar and singing, I opened my eyes and there standing sort of above me with guitars in their hands were Jerry Garcia and David Crosby. And they were working on this song. I looked around and there was a drum within reach and I just sat on the floor where I was and picked up the drum and started playing. Not an eyebrow was raised. There was no stopping of the music to tell me what to do. It just continued. That’s how these people were. They were so including, it didn’t matter that I was this young whipper snapper from India. They were fine with me wanting to join the conversation and they allowed me.

The thing that George Harrison always had while recording was … yoghurt and nuts and honey. That’s something he would have four or five bowls of in a day, no problem. I found this out when I was in London in a studio called the Trident Studio and I was helping George to edit a recording of Ravi Shankar and my father, which he was going to release on his Dark Horse record. During the lull when we were having the yoghurt and nuts George told me that he had this song that he was hearing a tabla on, a track he was working on, and asked if I could please put a tabla track on it. I didn’t realise what the song was going to be. He started to play the song and there was no voice on it when we recorded it. Once we’d recorded it we listened to it and he brought the voice track up and it was the title song of his album, Living in the Material World.

Being a musician means … you are always a student. It’s what keeps me performing. The opportunity to be able to play with musicians that I’ve never had the chance to work with and therefore learn more and expand my vision. I learn more so I can speak as many music languages as possible so that I can tell your music story to many different people all over the world in a way that they can understand.

I’m looking forward to touring in Australia ... and having a flat white, a good flat white.

Zakir Hussain will perform his show Triveni in Australia in July with leading Indian string performers, playing Robert Blackwood Hall, Monash University, Melbourne Friday 5 July and Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Sunday July 7.