With taals and ragas, Ustad Khurshid Hussain shows his talent is difficult to ‘beat’

Dazzling performance leaves crowd at T2F awestruck.

KARACHI: Ustad Khurshid Hussain is a man of few words and prefers to let his music do the talking. At a concert organised on Saturday evening by T2F, he delivered a soliloquy through his tabla which laughed and cried for him.

While enthralling the crowd with his music, Ustad Hussain periodically paused and spoke about how melodies from the tabla bring music to life. “I am not a very literate man and don’t speak much, so I prefer to express my emotions and feelings through the tabla.”

Though he claims that his knowledge is not so expansive, he explained the different gharanas - or schools of thought in Hindi music - with ease and elegance. His modesty also belies his stature and training. Ustad Hussain has had the opportunity and privilege to play with artists such as Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, Mehdi Hasan, Ustad Rais Khan and Farida Khanum.

It is claimed that his ‘gharana’ or school is the Ajrara gharana. But he learnt his trade from the renowned Ustad Habib Khan who trained him in the Delhi, Lucknow, Ajrara, Farukhabad, Benares and Punjab schools. Hussain’s father, Mehboob Khan, was a sarangi player.

At the concert, Ustad’s musical prowess and training were once again on display. Accompanied by Gul on the sarangi, he stunned the crowd by starting with a rela or a drum roll, playing an ensemble of different taals from different gharanas. “You have all the complexity, beauty and simplicity of music in the tabla. You have the right and wrong, the good and bad, the silent and loud and the male and female.”

He then played the basic 16 beat ‘teen taal’ which is more intricate than it sounds. A sudden hush fell over the crowd as he began his routine, starting with the bol and style of the Ajrara gharana, with the rhythm progressing and slowly intensifying.  Everyone in the room was left speechless and the applause grew louder with every tor - or break - at every 16th beat.

Ustad Hussain then gave an electrifying performance of a conversation between a man and woman which went from love to an argument before ending on compromise. “The softer it gets, the harder it becomes to rival the sound. People think the louder you play it, the better the sound. That is false.”

He concluded with faster taals or as he put it, crowd pleasers. Starting with the dhaadhra, an 18-beat taal, he took something simple and mixed it into the seven beat ‘ruupak’ which stunned the crowd. Even the Ustad was happy with the response the crowd gave him. “I am humbled to be in your presence and glad that I got this opportunity to play something like this from my heart for you,” he said after finishing his performance.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 12^th, 2012.