Who's your favorite Tabla player? I became oddly obsessed with this instrument for about two or three years of my life. It helped that I had an extremely competent teacher. My favorite player was Anindo Chatterjee. Of course, there are also a lot of extremely talented younger players.
I was training for a few years under Ustaad Khursheed Hussain, one of the finest Tabla players Pakistan produced. But he unfortunately died recently.
While you are training under a master, it's hard to have a favorite player, because you are also learning the style of your Ustaad. And doing that requires making that your favorite style, because that is the best way to imbue the master's style in your being.
Yeah, I'm aware that this is often the arrangement between teacher and student in India or Pakistan. My teacher was Nepali and studied both with his childhood teacher in Kathmandu and also with Suresh Talwalkar in New Delhi. We were actually about exactly the same age when I studied with him (both in our late twenties). So it was a much less formal arrangement because he was not exactly my elder. Also, it was an American setting as he was living around Denver, Colorado in the US.
Regardless, I still felt I owed him a great deal of respect because he took his music very seriously. He was legitimately a virtuoso at Tabla. Truly an amazing player. And I was committed to practicing diligently. Since life in the US didn't permit me to study all day with him, I spent a lot of time finding recordings of performances on Youtube to learn from. As I mentioned, my favorite performer other than my teacher was Anindo Chatterjee. My teacher also knew of Chatterjee and enjoyed his playing as much as I did. Since he was from a younger generation, I don't think he was bothered by my trying to learn from watching other players while I wasn't practicing with him.
Anyhow, nice to see mention of Tabla on Hacker News :).
Yes, it is definitely an older generation thing where people cared very much about style. It was necessary, because of the socioeconomic conditions of their time. To be financially secure, you needed to have patrons, and to lock in your patrons, you had to make yourself distinct by creating a particular style. Moreover, the lack of recordings before the 1950s, meant that people couldn't easily copy you.
Today, there are many more ways of making money as a player, and everything is recorded and ready to be copies, so people care less about style.
But I do care about it a little bit. My Ustaad had a very clear style of playing, where he made every note clear and distinct. So now, I don't like listening to some of the super fast rough styles that some players have. It is a legitimate style, but I have been trained to not like it.
> So now, I don't like listening to some of the super fast rough styles that some players have.
Completely agree with you on this point. I find that there are very few players that I actually enjoy listening to. Many players rush their playing and don't follow a clear rhythm or sound clear notes. Tabla is such a difficult instrument to play properly. Seems like it really takes a life time to become a good player. Sort of heart breaking since American life makes it hard to bring that kind of devotion to art (not if you want to be financially secure anyway).
