Zakir Hussain
Making Music

An universe in a grain of sand.

A genuine puzzle for the first Western musicians who approached it, Indian music reflects all the authority of a millennia-old, multi-ethnic culture that absorbs and assimilates the most traumatic differences between the various subcultures it comprises, returning a rainbow of nuances and micro-contrasts. Several of the most enlightened Western musicians have sought to draw from this inexhaustible heritage, suffice it to consider John Coltrane's study on microtonalities, followed by many of his disciples, or the experiments of guitarist John McLaughlin with the group Shakti. Not to mention contemporary music authors like Terry Riley or Steve Reich...

There have been many musical summit meetings between the two cultures, ours and the Indian one, with varying results. This one, which the Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain recorded in 1987 for ECM, features his compatriot Hariprasad Chaurasia on flute and offers the chance to listen to two musicians who have rarely collaborated, John McLaughlin and Jan Garbarek, two guiding stars in the fusion of jazz and ethnic music.

The tabla is a percussion instrument that is far from easy to play; it requires strict coordination and significant finger mobility. Zakir Hussain is probably the foremost expert on the tabla globally. He is a legacy artist: his father is the Indian classical musician Ustad Alla Rakha (himself a tabla player). He boasts decades of stage experience, as he has been performing publicly since the age of twelve, and has a long list of collaborations with musicians from the most diverse backgrounds, from Pharoah Sanders to George Harrison, from Tito Puente to Bill Laswell.

"Making Music" is a successful experiment of fusion between East and West. The quartet plays with space, tracing vast sound horizons, expanses of boundless peace punctuated by percussive passages of staggering virtuosity, where Zakir's fingers and hands seem to multiply in an infinite hall of mirrors.

To the casual listener, works of this type can appear as a flat, smooth, and caressing horizon but ultimately not very engaging. This is not the case with this album, enlivened by the beautiful interventions of an inspired Garbarek, which fit the music like a glove (the only flaw: the sax mixed a bit too "forward," but more than one of the Norwegian's albums suffers from this defect). Carried away by such grace, John McLaughlin abandons his usual torrential (and often, alas, manneristic) eloquence and gifts us with a handful of perfect solos, ranging from crystalline arpeggios to moments of uncontainable rhythmicity.

Relaxing music for the spirit, but continually stimulating for the mind.