World Music

The chicken-and-egg relationship between mouth-music and Indian drums reaches its zenith with the rapped mnemonics which sometimes escape from this head-fuddling masterdrummer in the classic Indian tablastyle. The one-time cornerstone of Shakti (with Ravi Shankar and John McLaughlin) and now living in San Francisco, Zakir Hussain (right) has composed for the Hong Kong Symphony, but he'll be more comfortable here with such like-minded souls as T. H. Vinayakram, another maestro on the ghatam, a pumpkin-sized clay pot; Shivamani, another multi-instrumental percussionist and his son Selva Ganesh; Bhavani Shankar's pakhawaj; Rajaram's dholki; and Sultan Khan's sarangi, a bowed string instrument that makes an outlandish sound like a jew's harp chewing metal gum. The complexity may come across as hypercerebral at first, but just get into the groove, and let the boys build up hard-core rhythms that woodpecker their way into neural circuitry. He plays at the National Concert Hall next Thursday.