Niladri Kumaar: The Space Between The Notes, Honoring Zakir Hussain
About This Event
Niladri Kumaar brings The Space Between The Notes to NJPAC, a program framed as a tribute to tabla master Zakir Hussain and his role as composer, producer, and a bridge between musical traditions. Working across rock and pop while drawing on Indian classical rhythm, Kumaar foregrounds pulse and tonal detail, treating rhythm as structural material and using silence as an active element.
About The Space Between The Notes
Now at NJPAC, *The Space Between The Notes* centers on Niladri Kumar’s genre-blurring approach to Indian classical language, framed as a tribute to tabla artist, composer, and producer Ustad Zakir Hussain. Hussain, son of Alla Rakha, spent much of his career in the San Francisco Bay Area and helped carry Indian classical music into broader American music life, including New York stages. Featured performers include Niladri Kumar and Zakir Hussain. The program’s clearest point is not fusion for its own sake, but attention to how rhythm and melody travel between traditions.
About the Artists
Niladri Kumar
Niladri Kumar is an India-born musician whose work moves between rock and pop frameworks and the vocabulary of Indian classical rhythm and melody. At NJPAC, he has appeared in programs such as *Niladri Kumaar: The Space Between The Notes*, a tribute to tabla master Zakir Hussain, with whom Kumar has been associated onstage.
Niladri Kumaar
Niladri Kumaar is an individual artist working across rock and pop, with appearances at NJPAC that place his work in conversation with Indian classical lineage. His program *The Space Between The Notes* was framed as a tribute to tabla master Zakir Hussain, acknowledging Hussain’s role as a composer, producer, and major bridge between traditions.
Zakir Hussain
Zakir Hussain was an Indian tabla player, composer, arranger, and producer whose work moved between classical tradition and cross-genre collaboration. Trained in the lineage of his father, tabla master Alla Rakha, he later spent much of his career based in the San Francisco Bay Area while touring widely.