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Legendary Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain dies at 73
Legendary Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain dies at 73
Getty Images“Zakir Hussain, one of the world's greatest tabla players, has died at the age of 73.
The Indian classical music icon died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease, at a hospital in San Francisco, his family said in a statement.
Hussain was a four-time Grammy award winner and has received the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian award.
Through his performances, he transformed the tabla into a globally loved solo instrument that was the star of the show.
The tabla - a pair of drums used in north Indian classical music - was historically viewed as an accompaniment to the main performance.
As news of Hussain's death broke, tributes have begun pouring in.
Nayan Ghosh, who plays the sitar and tabla, called the news "devastating" and said that his association with Hussain went back 60 years to their childhood.
"He was a pathbreaker, a game-changer, an icon who put tabla and Indian music on the world map by transcending the boundaries of genre and inspiring generations of artistes," he told the BBC.
Born in Mumbai in 1951, Hussain began training under his father Ustad Allarakha Khan, a tabla maestro himself.
Hussain performed his first concert when he was just seven years old.
"In later years, his masterful dexterity and creative genius led to his becoming one of the most sought-after accompanists to the very best of Hindustani classical musicians and dancers," wrote Nasreen Munni Kabir in a biography of him published in 2018.
Reviewing his 2009 performance at New York's Carnegie Hall, the New York Times described him as "a fearsome technician but also a whimsical inventor".
"So he rarely seems overbearing, even when the blur of his fingers rival the beat of a hummingbird's wings," it said.“
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58 Jazz Musicians Were Photographed for ‘Harlem 1958.' Only One Remains. - The New York Times
58 Jazz Luminaries Assembled for This Photo. Only One Remains.
"Art Kane’s “Harlem 1958” gathered giants of the music. Sonny Rollins, 94, looks back at the historic picture.
On Aug. 12, 1958, Art Kane gathered 58 jazz notables in front of an East 126th St. brownstone for a group portrait.
What started out as “sort of a graduation photo or class picture of all the jazz musicians,” as Kane once put it, became perhaps the most emblematic and enduring image from the genre’s golden age.
Only one of its subjects is still alive: the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, 94, who spoke in a phone interview about the image’s power at a time of pervasive segregation and racism.
“It just seemed like we weren’t appreciated,” he said from his home in Woodstock, N.Y.,“mainly because jazz was a Black art.”
“I think that picture humanized a lot of the myth of what people thought jazz was,” he added.
Today the photo titled “Harlem 1958” is better known as “A Great Day in Harlem,” after an Oscar-nominated 1994 documentary on its creation.
Kane and an assistant directed the group as best they could, with the photographer addressing them using a rolled-up New York Times as what he later called “a sort of megaphone.”
A row of children, most from the neighborhood, spontaneously lined up on the curb in front, to Kane’s delight.
The assembled musicians included giants of the swing era, such as Mary Lou Williams, Lester Young, and Count Basie …
… and bebop trailblazers like Dizzy Gillespie.
In the mid-40s, Gillespie — along with his frequent collaborator Charlie Parker — emerged as a leading exponent of the speedy, virtuosic small-group style known as bebop.
The group also included artists, like Charles Mingus, whose work pointed the way toward the more exploratory styles that followed.
By 1958, Mingus, who had moved from Los Angeles earlier in the decade, was fine-tuning the soulful, kaleidoscopic blend that would peak the next year on his masterpiece “Mingus Ah Um.”
The photograph appeared in Esquire’s January 1959 issue. Kane, then 33, was an art director at Seventeen magazine who also taught at the New School. Robert Benton, one of his students, was the art director at Esquire and asked him to brainstorm concepts for an issue focused on jazz.
The location was crucial: “Jazz came into New York City in Harlem,” Jonathan Kane, the photographer’s son and director of his archive, explained of his father’s thinking in a phone interview. (Art Kane died in 1995.)
Harlem was a hotbed of New York jazz for decades, home to swing-era meccas such as the Savoy Ballroomand the Cotton Club, and the bebop haven Minton’s Playhouse.
In the late ’50s, Rollins’s career was gaining steam, thanks in part to albums such as “Way Out West” and “Saxophone Colossus,” which went on to become jazz canon.
But showing up for the photo and watching so many of his heroes and forebears gather, he still felt like the young acolyte who had formerly waited outside the Harlem home of Coleman Hawkins, the patron saint of jazz tenor saxophone, to get an autograph.
“I was a fan,” Rollins said. “I was in the picture, but it wasn’t so much as a musician — although I happened to be there as a musician — but I had been following jazz all my short life up to that time, so I knew a great deal about the guys.”
Despite his somewhat inconspicuous placement in the front right of the photo, Rollins stands out, in part because he is only one of two musicians, along with the pianist Thelonious Monk, who is seen wearing shades.
“Sunglasses were sort of the new wave,” Rollins said. “A lot of the new guys coming out were wearing sunglasses.”
For Rollins, the presence of Hawkins was highly significant.
“My particular idols, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, were both in that picture,” Rollins said. “Those guys are much beyond me, but I guess I’ll be remembered with them when people look at this picture: ‘Oh, there’s Sonny Rollins, and wow, look, there’s Coleman Hawkins!’”
Young, the so-called “President” of the instrument, was the other most admired saxophonist of the swing era.
“I’m put in that great group of people,” Rollins said incredulously. “It’s really too much to realize.”
Though the arrangement of musicians in the frame was unplanned, certain impromptu groupings did arise.
In the center of the shot, three master drummers, Jo Jones, Gene Krupa and George Wettling, found their way into a cluster …
… while a trio of distinguished trumpeters, Rex Stewart, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie, stands out on the far right.
“Like water seeks its own level, all the piano players begin to get over here and shake hands, all the drummers were over here,” said the bassist Milt Hinton in the 1994 “Great Day” doc, noting how the horn players were over in the corner, “all laughing and talking.”
Monk tended to stand out in any crowd, but his prominence here was partly by design.
As Robert Altshuler — then a publicist for Monk’s label, Riverside, who was responsible for picking him up that day and escorting him to the shoot along with the saxophonist Gigi Gryce — recalled in the “Great Day” doc, Monk kept him waiting outside his apartment for an hour-plus, the cab’s meter running all the while.
The reason, as he later learned from Gryce: “He came to the conclusion that most people, since they saw this as a special occasion, would probably wear a dark suit,” Altshuler said, “so he elected to wear a light-colored jacket.”
Jonathan Kane cited one more strategic move on Monk’s part: standing next to Marian McPartland and Mary Lou Williams, two of only three women in the photo.
In 1958, Williams — an admired swing-era pianist-arranger who also mentored bebop pioneers — had recently returned to the scene after a three-year hiatus, spurred by a religious awakening.
McPartland would find her greatest acclaim as the host of the beloved public-radio show “Piano Jazz,” but at the time this photo was taken, the England-born pianist was busy as a gigging bandleader, heading up a tight, swinging trio.
In the bottom left of the final photo, there’s a noticeable blank space between the pianist Luckey Roberts and the singer Maxine Sullivan.
As seen in outtakes reproduced in a commemorative 60th anniversary book named after the photo, the spot had been filled earlier on by Willie Smith, known as “the Lion,” Roberts’s friend and fellow Harlem-stride luminary.
But as one eyewitness, the pianist Mike Lipskin, later described, Smith “suffered from heat, and it was anything but temperate that August day.” Smith sat down for a rest on the steps of a nearby brownstone, out of frame, and ended up absent from the final image.
The pianist and renowned big-band leader Count Basie’s status as the only seated musician in the final photo apparently was the result of one of what Kane once called the many “little mini-dramas” unfolding among the group.
According to Jonathan Kane, one of the children gathered in front repeatedly stole Basie’s hat as a prank. “Basie had chased the kid, and it was like a little game they were playing,” he said. “Basie finally just sat down on the curb with the kids, and he’s holding his hat in his hand,” as if to say, “‘OK, I give up.’”
One of the top names in big-band jazz, Basie pioneered the hard-driving sound of Kansas City swing and later brought it to a global audience.
The saxophonist Benny Golson, then in the early phase of a long and brilliant career, appears near the top of the photograph.
Along with Rollins, Golson, then 29, was among the youngest musicians in the group, and until his death in September, the second-to-last survivor. Golson often acknowledged the import of “Harlem 1958,” once calling it a “cornucopia of enriching lives.”
For Jonathan Kane, the end result’s mix of happenstance and careful planning is part of what gives the image its magnetic power.
“He was a control freak,” he said of his father, “who also believed in serendipity.”