- Lived:
- 9 March 1951, Bombay (Mumbai) – 15 December 2024, San Francisco · a childhood in Mahim, a home in the hills north of San Francisco, and fifty years of the road between India and everywhere else
- Field:
- Hindustani classical music — the tabla, in the Punjab gharana of his father Ustad Alla Rakha — and every music the tabla could talk to: jazz, folk, film, symphony, electronica
- The Big Idea:
- The tabla had always sat behind the singer, keeping time. Zakir Hussain stood it at the front of the stage and made the world listen to the drum itself — first in India's own concert halls, then, through Shakti and everything after, on every stage on earth.
- In their words:
- He waved off the word "maestro" all his life; "I am a student," he liked to say in interviews — the learning, he insisted, never finishes (his oft-repeated self-description, paraphrased closely).
- If you remember one thing:
- A father whispered rhythms into his newborn son's ear instead of a prayer — so the son's own telling goes — and the son spent seventy-three years proving that rhythm is a language, one that a boy from Mahim could speak to the whole planet.