Zakir Hussain, who has died at the far too young age of 73, made a huge contribution to the Indian classical tradition. Just a few examples from my own CD library are the 1993 Royal Albert Hall Concert for Peace with Ravi Shankar, the 1997 concert recording from Stuttgart with sitarist Ustad Vilayat Khan, and the 1990 concert in Passaic Valley Auditorium, New Jersey with sarangist Sultan Khan. Elsewhere tributes have lazily centred on Zakir's collaborations with George Harrison and Van Morrison, supplemented by the usual YouTube videos. So I want to highlight two other collaborations which highlight just what a visionary genius Zakir Hussain was. Arguably Zakir's furthest left-field project was Tabla Beat Science with bass guitarist, producer and demolisher of comfort zones Bill Laswell . This collaboration, described by a reviewer as "hard-hitting westernised electric fusion...a cross-cultural technical extravaganza", produced two remarkable CD releases, Tala Mat...
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It doesn't seem to have occured to anyone that the reason I embed links to other OAOP posts is to add value, and that I couldn't give a stuff where my blog appears in primacy tables.
Hyperlinks are the point of the internet guys.
"the refreshingly unselflinking Alex Ross"
Oh please, I'm starting a blog on rabbit breeding.
Oh please, I'm starting a blog on rabbit breeding.
Hahahahaha.
Yikes, my fellow Yanks. I've noticed that Americans in general have an amazing ability to leech every last bit of fun and interest out of things by turning them in to surrogate sporting contests, marketing opportunities or, more commonly, putting a dreary Puritanical gloss on them.
That's surely a joke, because if you took away Mr. Ross' links to his New Yorker articles, TRIN would be pretty thin gruel at times.
The Sounds & Fury ranking is a useful, but debatable, guide to the ranking of classical music blogs for those that need one.
But it may be worth considering that the apparent popularity of OAOP is due to the fact that readers actually like both the content and the embedded links, rather than being achieved by some cunning and arcane mathematical manipulation.