Zakir Hussain, who has died aged 73 after suffering from complications arising from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, was one of India’s best loved and most adventurous musicians. A virtuoso tabla player with a global following, he transformed the range and appeal of the hand drums that are the main percussion instrument in Hindustani classical music.
His playing was technically brilliant, sensitive, emotional and varied, with the jugalbandi, a call-and-response duet between two different instruments, often a remarkable part of his performance. He constantly surprised his audience, switching between ragas, jazz and fusion styles in a career lasting more than five decades.
Moving between different projects, he worked with a remarkable variety of musicians, including Ravi Shankar, George Harrison, Van Morrison, John McLaughlin, Pharoah Sanders and Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead. Hussain started out as a teenage sensation in India, and ended in equally triumphant style – in February 2024 he won three Grammys in one night, a first for an Indian musician.
He was taught by his father, Alla Rakha, a celebrated tabla player who worked with Shankar, and Zakir’s career in the west started almost by accident. A gifted musician, he had worked on Bollywood musicals, while also mastering classical styles, and when his father was unwell and unable to join Shankar for a concert in New York in 1969, he suggested his son should take his place. American audiences were delighted by the 18-year-old – as was Shankar. They continued to work together, and Hussain moved to the West Coast, teaching music at the University of Washington, Seattle, and then in San Francisco.
He had eclectic musical tastes and had taken an interest in western rock just as many western musicians, most notably the Beatles, were taking an interest in Indian music. Through Shankar, Zakir got to meet Harrison – who reportedly told him to stick to the tabla rather than move to a western drum kit – and he was invited play on Harrison’s 1973 album, Living in the Material World.
McLaughlin was another English guitarist fascinated by Indian music. He was a jazz player rather than a rock star, and had worked with Miles Davis and Tony Williams before starting the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a jazz-fusion band that mixed funk and complex time signatures with arrangements influenced by Indian classical styles. When the first version of the orchestra broke up in 1974, McLaughlin continued the Indian musical experiments with a new band, Shakti, in which he was joined by Hussain and Indian violinist Lakshminarayana Shankar. The band recorded, toured extensively (including appearances at the Montreux jazz festival) and became leaders of what was known as the “global fusion” scene. McLaughlin described Hussain as “the King, in whose hands rhythm became magic”.
Others among his many collaborators included Morrison (Hussain played on his 1979 album Into the Music), and Hart, who knew and admired Hussain’s father; they worked together in the percussion-based Diga Rhythm Band in 1976, and reunited in 1991 for the more successful Planet Drum album, which featured percussionists from around the world and won them a Grammy.
Hussain continued to switch between different styles. In 1993 he was reunited with Ravi Shankar at his Concert for World Peace at the Royal Albert Hall in London – a reminder that he was still involved in Indian classical projects – and in 1997 was reunited with McLaughlin in the Remember Shakti band. Two years later Hussain co-founded the experimental Tabla Beat Science, in which he was joined by producer and bass player Bill Laswell in a band that mixed Hindustani classical styles with hip hop, drum’n’bass and electronica. When they played at the London Barbican in 2003, with the Ethiopian singer Gigi, Hussain used his teeth and cheeks as percussion instruments.
In 2007 he was back with Hart and other percussionists for Global Drum Project, a follow-up to Planet Drum that won them another Grammy. And in 2015 he played in yet another fusion project, Celtic Connections: Pulse of the World, which compared the structure of Scottish folk songs and Indian ragas.
In 2020 he joined McLaughlin yet again as Shakti re-formed to mark their 50th anniversary. Their comeback set This Moment was awarded a Grammy for best global music album, one of the three Grammys that Hussain won in 2024. The others were for the song Pashto (best global music performance) which appeared on the album As We Speak (best contemporary instrumental album), which he recorded with Béla Fleck and Edgar Meyer.
In July 2024 he played alongside Louiz Banks (“the godfather of Indian jazz”) at the Maestros in Fusion concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall.
Alongside his percussion work, he was also a composer, often for films, and an actor. He wrote three concertos, including the first composed for tabla, and his film work included playing on the soundtrack for Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993). As an actor he appeared in the Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust (1983), for which he was associate music director.
Born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1951, he was the eldest son of Alla Rakha and his wife Bavi Begum. He said that his mother changed his name to Zakir Hussain (rather than using the family name of Qureshi) “on the advice of a saint”, and that his father had whispered tabla rhythms into his ears when he was a baby, before teaching him to play and helping to launch his career.
He is survived by his wife, Antonia Minnecola, a leading exponent of kathak, the traditional dance style of northern India, whom he married in 1978, their children, Isabella and Anisa, and a sister and two brothers.
• Zakir Hussain Allarakha Qureshi, musician, composer and actor, born 9 March 1951; died 15 December 2024
