Ustaad Allah Rakha - Page 2

One day Phil handed me a record and said, "I think you should hear this!" It was called Drums of North and South India, and it featured a master tabla player named Alla Rakha. I'd been fooling around with a pair of tablas without really knowing what I was doing, so I was pretty excited as I slipped Alla Rakha onto my turntable and picked up the tablas, ready to mimic the beat.

I may have tapped the skins two or three times as the record started, but no more than that. I remember sitting there, totally dumbfounded, feeling as if someone had turned the lights out. In terms of rhythm, I mean. It sounded like five or six guys playing these tight muscular rhythmic cycles that constantly changed. Every time I thought I had the beat nailed, it would evaporate, only to pop up a minute later as a completely new rhythm. It was like chasing a greased pig blindfolded. I grabbed the record jacket. No way this could be one middle-aged Indian. But that's what the liner notes said.

I opened the door and yelled for Phil. "Do me a favor," I said. "Read the back of this album and tell me that this is just one guy playing."

Phil assured me it was.

Alla Rakha was a rhythm master—my first. He was a Mozart of my instrument, and yet world music was arranged into such a rigid caste system that I had never heard of this man. Nor had anyone told me that in India drummers had refined the art of rhythm to such a sublime complexity that it sounded, even to someone who had been working with rhythm all his life, like magic.

Several weeks later, the Grateful Dead were off to New York City to play Bill Graham's Fillmore East. The first night at the Fillmore there were almost more people backstage than in the audience. One of them was a friend of Stanley Krippner's whom I'd met before, a woman named Jean Mayo. Jean, it turned out, was in New York chaperoning the first American tour of a classical Indian troupe that included sitarist Ravi Shankar and drummer Alla Rakha. They were playing in Mineola, Long Island, on one of my free nights.

I felt as if a divine wish had been granted. The God of the Story had sent this rhythm master to me so I could witness his amazing technique in the flesh. The whole time Alla Rakha played my eyes were locked on his hands. I didn't even have a good sense of what he looked like until Jean introduced us later backstage.

Learning that I was a drummer, Alla Rakha invited me back to his hotel room for tea. I brought my pad and sticks with me, and I also happened to bring along a curious little device known as a tri-nome. A tri-nome is a metronome that can keep track of three rhythmic cycles. Each cycle has a different sound. You can set it so the three beats will all weave in and out of each other, circling around in endless loops, and every time the loops intersect with each other a bell will bong, indicating what is known as "the One."

The One—the alpha and the omega, the end and the beginning of the rhythmic cycle.

Alla Rakha was amused by the tri-nome. Picking up my pad, he began to demonstrate a rhythm game to me. He beat out a count to ten and then called out a number, which I then tried to place on top of his next ten beats. For instance, when he called "twelve," I tried to lay twelve beats down within the span of his ten, so that his last beat and my last beat would meet—at the One.

With this simple game, Alla Rakha destroyed my beliefs about rhythm. Rhythm was just time, I realized, and time could be carved up any way you wanted.

We did eleven over nine and twelve over eight and fifteen over thirteen. He showed me the obvious truth that twelve bars of eleven was the same as eleven bars of twelve.

He held onto my hand as I beat so I could feel how time was infinitely elastic. He made me feel what four felt like, then while I was doing four with my left hand, he showed me how I could put five into that four with my right hand.

Even beating on the pad with my fingers I felt it. Every time you crossed at the One, the energy shot up a little. There was a little pop! of something like adrenaline, only in your head.

I returned from that hotel room feeling as if I'd been shown the Golden Tablets.