Zakir Hussain

CD version. Making Music brought together four improvisers from different traditions under the name of the tabla master Zakir Hussain. Released by ECM in 1987, it set Hindustani flute and tabla beside European saxophone and acoustic guitar without reducing either side to colour. Decades later Songlines wrote that it set a high bar for East-meets-West collaboration.

Hussain plays tabla and percussion and adds voice. With him are the bansuri master Hariprasad Chaurasia on flutes, John McLaughlin on acoustic guitar and Jan Garbarek on tenor and soprano saxophones. Hussain and McLaughlin had worked together since the mid-1970s in Shakti, the acoustic group in which McLaughlin's guitar met Indian classical musicians. The album was recorded digitally in December 1986 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. Hussain wrote six of the eight pieces.

The title track opens on Chaurasia's flute, and the rhythm takes shape before the tabla enters. McLaughlin's Zakir, a dedication to the leader, is mostly a dialogue between guitar and flute that lets Chaurasia's pure tone come forward. Anisa starts with Garbarek and McLaughlin together before the drums push it into the liveliest playing on the record.

Contemporary critics praised the balance between the four voices. "The exchanges of flute, tabla and guitar are often breath taking," wrote The Philadelphia Tribune in 1987, calling the album "a hybrid that diminishes neither". In DownBeat, Bill Milkowski said of Hussain that "this cat can burn a blue streak or walk on egg shells". He found Garbarek's lines with Chaurasia chilling at times. The German monthly Stereo named it record of the month and singled out Chaurasia as the outstanding musician of the session. Uwe Schmitt of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung compared its finesse and concentration to a string quartet, where the lead passes from one player to another within seconds. Reviewing the music again in Jazz Journal in 2025, Barry Witherden described it as largely low-key and finely recorded.

This is the CD edition of ECM 1349 (also numbered 831 544-2), first released in May 1987, with a cover photograph by Christian Vogt.