Bluegrass Tabla: It Sounds Better Than it Sounds

Begin with the Indian tabla. Add bluegrass banjo in a contemplative mood. Cue the rollicking bass. Throw in some toe-tapping and jolly head-bopping for good measure. It sounds like a world fusion music parody -- or it sounds just awful. But on Tuesday night at Carnegie's cool Zankel Hall, the penultimate night of the "Perspectives" series, the experiment was being conducted by some of the world's finest musicians: India's most renowned percussionist (and the reason for the series), Zakir Hussain, was joined by banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck and classical bassist Edgar Meyer. In their breathtaking hands, the resonances between American and Indian roots wasn't a gimmick. No: they were blending genres like a DJ with a mixer, and sometimes it was hard to tell what they were sampling, between the bright sitar invocations of the banjo, the tabla's classical bass resonances and the bass's echoes of both of those sounds. Somewhere in between their plucking and slapping, you could almost make out the undoing of fusion music, and the sounds of its wild rebirth.

To get comfortable with this genre-bending wasn't just a matter of previous experience in other sections of the record shop -- Hussain loves jazz, Fleck has a new album of African collaborations, and Meyer is an able bluegrass player. Their coherence has got just as much if not more to do with a deep and wide-ranging appreciation for and relationship with their instruments. Just as Fleck can bring his banjo's bright tones into darker places, so does Hussain make the tabla sing, turning its brooding stalk into a fleet-footed ramble though the woods of Appalachia (at one moment, over the strum of banjo, the brushing of a frame drum made the unmistakable sound of a locamotive in the distance). His tabla is as open, happy and effervescent as the man himself. As I watched his fingers and facial expressions, the only word that came to mind was -- I'm serious -- Chaplinesque. Hussain's spirit was the third crucial ingredient: it lubricated their lively interaction, which was less a jazzy conversation than a manage-a-trois, with lots of unusual positions. ("bluegrass tabla," anyone?)

It looked effortless, but this, their first full concert together ahead of a new album (they collaborated once before in 2006 with the Detroit and Nashville Symphonies), wasn't, said Fleck. "If you sense fear, it's coming from the stage," he said at the start. "In fact," Meyer chimed in, "you can probably smell it."

It smelled really good.

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