Zakir Hussain - Remember Shakti

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 Matrix and Tabla Beat Science Live in San Francisco at Stern Grove.


But in my book Zakir Hussain's greatest fusion contribution was his collaboration with guitarist John McLaughlin, who he met while studying at Wesleyan University in 1975. The band Shakti which they formed with other musicians recorded six genre-defining albums between 1977 and 2000, plus a belated 2023 tribute collaboration.



In 2018 Zakir Hussain: A Life in Music - in conversation with Nasreen Munni Kabir was published in India. Zakir's concluding words in that book make a fitting tribute: 

Success is not how many Grammys you win or how many platinum records you have. Success is standing tall behind something and saying - this is what I wanted. I am one of those musicians who came at the cusp of a great change in the music world and I was carried on that wave. I had the good fortune of establishing a very unhurried relationship with music, and at the same time, the wave took me places. Otherwise, I would have to run to keep up. I was already sitting on the bus before it drove off. 

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