There is no dearth of films on musical personalities. But most of them are little more than listless recitals of facts about a given musician’s life and accomplishments. Often failing to distil the essence of the artist as a creative soul and human being, or showing no interest in placing him in the context of his society and his times, such films are deservedly lost in rusted cans consigned to cobwebs and cockroaches.
However, there happens once in a long while something like Zakir and his Friends, which effortlessly pushes the frontiers of both biographical documentation and documentary film-making. The film related the celebrated tabla player, Zakir Hussain’s personal story partly in terms of how it related to the music and vision of other poets of percussion in other parts of the world. Some of these fellow-poets were or are as well-known as Zakir, others quite anonymous but great artists nonetheless in their own distinctive fashion. Significantly, if Zakir influenced some of them, he was influenced by them no less.
In the late 90’s, Lutz Leonhardt, a German-born Swiss film-maker, made a unique interpretation of the Zakir persona and phenomenon which won him international acclaim. Leonhardt: “Dialogue is a major characteristic of Zakir’s music. Maybe he was born with the gift of musical communication but it is only in a dialogue with all these different musicians from different cultures that he has become the brilliant, in the broadest sense of the word, well-travelled musician he is today.”
Words would come as easily to Zakir’s lips as sounds to his palms and fingers. The flashy clothes he wore at times or the abundant, well-cultivated locks he sported, possibly as a kind of personal trademark, may not have been in keeping with our traditional impression of the sangeet sadhak, but there was no denying the genius of the young maestro as he plumbed the depths of his musical roots or those of the contemporary world experience as he encountered it at different levels and layers in different continents. If anything, the words, the gestures, the clothes, the locks, the looks, joyously combined to build a mask behind which hid the infinite treasures of the sensualist of sound.
Zakir, like Ravi Shankar, was a phantasmagoric fusion of the modern and the traditional; of the local and the universal. He was, indeed, an honorary citizen of the cosmos of musical being and consciousness. The younger genius is heard saying: “I don’t just keep strictly to the tabla repertoire laid down by the traditions of North Indian music. I attempt to find out what other sounds there are, what new combinations of rhythms are possible and how I can extend the repertoire. New sounds can enrich and expand the old traditions. I started out with the fantastically rich rhythmic forms of Indian music and added to them the melodic possibilities I picked up from other cultures. Drummers from Brazil, the Caribbean, Indonesia, Japan and, of course, other instrumentalists too have all influenced my music. What all these people have in common is that they try to make their instruments speak with its own voice. They look into it, open up the lid to see what it might still conceal. They have helped me to explore the possibilities of my table.”
For the possible benefit of pundits and purists inclined to take a dim view of Zakir’s alleged musical miscegenation, he said with a confidence that became the true-blooded artist: “As long as I remain aware of my roots and traditions, I can let everything flow through me and turn into my own music – whether it’s jazz, African, Latin American, pop, rock or metallica. If you stay conscious of your roots, you can be a medium for other music. At its best, it’s like a rainbow: all the colours are there but there’s no confusion because there’s room for all of them.”
Even as Zakir related the high points of his teasingly colourful and intensely productive life, the note that kept repeatedly surfacing was that of his Sufi-like, eclectic approach to his vocation which in some unfathomable way enriched him beyond measure, giving his personality depth, a sense of harmony and a remarkably rounded character.
Zakir: “After being ten years on the concert stage, by the time I was seventeen, people expected me to play like a master of the art but, naturally, at that age there was no way I could come up to their expectations. In view of that, it was good for me to get away for a while. When I first arrived in America, the most important people to me were Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar. It was through them that I got to know Mickey Hart of the “Grateful Dead” and John McLaughlin who I played alongside shortly after in a group called “Shakti”. I went on tour with Ali Akbar Khan. Someone had to give me a push in the right direction and Ali Akbar Khan, the master, was the one to do it. I could feel windows opening up inside me and, under his influence, I overcame my creative block …I had the opportunity of studying and teaching at the College of Ethno-Music in the University of Washington. Coming out of every room you heard African music, gamelan from Indonesia, classical Japanese and Chinese music, and Latin American rhythms. It was like being let into Ali Baba’s cave.”
Son of the illustrious Allah Rakha whose name was synonymous with soaring and sublime tabla-playing, Zakir shared with his father an endless quest for excellence, characterised in one aspect by an insatiable appetite for experimentation. Trying to evolve and articulate fresh idioms of sound was like, so to say, a second religion to both. But whereas Allah Rakha had lived the greater part of his life in an earlier world with its peculiar confines of time and space, Zakir was more fortunate in that it was given to him to inhabit a less constricted planet where winds of exchange blew more freely.
“In India it is still a tradition for a son to follow in his father’s footsteps, especially in the arts. I was born into a family of musicians; my father, Allah Rakha, was and still is one of India’s greatest exponents of the tabla. I have always been very close to him. He is my affectionate father, teacher and guru, all in one.”
Zakir’s recollections of the beginnings of his career are enlivened by a naughty sense of fun. “When I was ten years old I went on tour for the first time. My father was very busy and many of the inquiries that came to our house were in English. As I was the only one who could speak and read English, I answered them. When my father was on tour, I wrote back saying so and adding that I was available. Some promoters said, “Ok then, you come”. I was really a very cheeky youngster. I got some money and a few friends together and away we went. Without saying anything to my mother, I packed my tabla first thing in the morning and instead of going to school we took a train to where the concert was being held. At the age of seventeen, I had been all over India and had made something of a name for myself.”
That ‘cheeky youngster’ grew to be an international celebrity in no time. Lutz Leonhardt’s road-movie was a homespun celebration of that fact; a celebration belted out in a language that is uniquely the director’s. This is a film that Doordarshan would do well to show its viewers on the national network. The film deserves to be shown; we deserve to see it. Because, in its own way, it evokes, among other things, a time in the life of the Indian nation when one’s merit mattered more than the accident of who was born into which faith. If music is god, which some holy innocents claim it to be. Zakir Hussain was an epitome of godliness.
Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on cinema, society, politics.
