Book Excerpts: Zakir Hussain on his ideal audience

Nasreen Munni Kabir: It’s magical for the audience to witness a moment when a performance rises to another plane. After so many years of interacting with audiences all around the world, can you gauge audience reaction easily?

Zakir Hussain: I think audiences are much the same everywhere. The world knows about the world today. There is nothing about Rwanda that people in Oregon can’t discover. You can learn about everything wherever you are.

Gauging audiences today is more about my ability to plant a new thought in their minds. I have the confidence now to explore musical ideas that are more challenging in some ways—I don’t worry so much about what the audience thinks. You’ll find young musicians concerned about how the audience reacts. I was like that too when I was twenty or twenty-five—it was a whole different connection. I used to be direct, more eye to eye. In a solo concert, I told stories, created visuals, and did all sorts of stuff, and sometimes I even elaborated on an idea based, on the reaction of the audience. It worked fantastically, but now I don’t even announce what I’m going to do. I just start playing.

Here, I’ll take Ravi Shankarji’s example. From the late 1960s to almost the early 1980s, he conversed a lot with his audience. He talked to them about the music and joked with them. He became a little more closed later in life and I wondered why—it was not that he had run out of things to say—it was just that he probably thought to himself: ‘They know enough about me, Ravi Shankar, so I have the confidence that they’ll take this journey with me. I can now explore the depths that exist in music, as opposed to worrying: “Are they with me or not?”’

I think you get to a point in your professional life where the connection with the audience comes from their familiarity with what you do.

Nasreen Munni Kabir: Are there some performances that you avoid?

Zakir Hussain: I don’t play at private gatherings, corporate events or weddings. I just don’t. Those are places where people come to socialize, to drink and perhaps have a meal. That’s not the way music should be heard.

For me, it’s the concert hall or the theatre—people take their seats, the hall darkens and we musicians take our place. Now the audience’s focus is fully on the stage. I have often said that the first fifteen minutes of a concert are the most important because artists and audience are establishing contact and a zillion other things cannot happen at the same time. I don’t allow photographers to walk around when we start playing. I have always requested the organizers to kindly close the doors as soon as the concert begins, and not to let anybody in until there is a little lull and then latecomers can take their seats. They do that in Western classical concerts. It’s nothing new.

Nasreen Munni Kabir: Does it matter to you if the audience is made up of four thousand people or forty? Do you prefer a smaller audience?

Zakir Hussain: A small audience allows for intimacy. Music transmits better; especially traditional music, which requires interaction between audience and artist. If you’re within touching distance of each other and you have eye contact, the experience is something very special. When I’m talking with you, there should be that spark of understanding of what is being said.

I look for that acceptance; my ego requires that my playing is getting across.

When you are in a 4,000-seater, you have no clue what’s happening back there. The energy, the strength and power that a note has in the first or third row is not the same twenty rows back. You can hear the music, enjoy it, and even feel its depth in a large hall, but a fuller experience only happens in an intimate gathering—the kind that you have in a one-on- one conversation. It’s not unlike chamber music concerts in the Western classical tradition and you understand why these are sought after.

When someone like Vilayat Khansahib or Bismillah Khansahib played in a small mehfil, talking and playing invariably came together: ‘Arey mian, yeh Dada ustad ki cheez hai, yeh main suna raha hoon, suno. Isme dekho yeh sur kaise lag raha hai.’ [I’ll play a master’s composition for you. How do these notes sound?]

Intimacy is also important because we musicians can try out new things because we know we’re performing for like- minded people, and the reaction of that small gathering might legitimize what we happen to be working on.

Nasreen Munni Kabir: It sounds like the experience of listening to jazz in a club.

Zakir Hussain: The small baithaks were exactly like that. It did not matter to the musicians that they were not getting much money because the audience was small, but they happily performed for twice as long as they would have perhaps in Birla Hall or Shanmukhananda Hall.

Intimate concerts are definitely something that I personally look forward to. That’s why I love playing at Prithvi Theatre. I don’t get paid for the memorial concert, nor do I expect to be paid.

Nasreen Munni Kabir: You’re no doubt referring to Jennifer Kendal’s memorial concert that’s held every year on 28 February at Prithvi in Bombay. I had the good fortune of attending those events for two years running. Crowds of people queued up for hours before the start time because they knew they were in for a treat.

Can you tell us something about the early concerts? I mean before you started performing in large city halls and auditoriums.

Zakir Hussain: We used to play in big pandals. You could hear the sound of the traffic and the trains going by. What I noticed was that the musicians would maintain eye contact with some people in the audience. I did the same thing too and that connection sort of spread to the people around them and behind them. It’s a chain reaction, a ripple effect.

I think most musicians would agree that playing music could also be a visual experience. To me the emotional content of music requires visuals. When I’m playing, I see images, paintings, landscapes and animals. I see different human beings. Assimilation, analysis and emulation—all of this has to happen at the same time during a performance.

— Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins