How to listen to a tabla solo

The word solo is slightly misleading. A tabla recital almost never happens alone. As the tabla player and researcher Pandit Aneesh Pradhan explains, solo recitals carry a melodic accompaniment called lehera or naghma, played on sarangi or harmonium; in parts of India, particularly West Bengal, a solo presentation is even called a lehera. That accompanying line is a single recurring melody, played with minimal embellishment, holding the rhythmic canvas of the chosen taal steady while the drums move around it.

For a newcomer, that repeating line is the most useful thing on the stage. You do not need to count in order to follow a solo. You need to hear the loop.

Find the cycle first

Most solos you will encounter are in Teentaal, a cycle of sixteen matras or time units, divided into four groups of four. Three of those groups are marked by a clap and one, the ninth beat, by a silent wave of the hand; the first beat of the cycle, the point everything returns to, is called sam.

The ethnomusicologist Rebecca Stewart noted that performers and audiences alike gesture through this structure, and that the clap marking sam is conventionally written not as a number but as a cross, so central is it to the music. If you watch an audience at a recital, you will see hands quietly keeping the shape of the cycle. Listen for the melodic line beginning again: that is sam coming round. Once you can feel that return, the drumming stops sounding like a stream of syllables and starts sounding like architecture.

The opening: peshkar, or uthan

In the Delhi and Ajrada styles, a solo opens with peshkar, an introductory composition in slow tempo whose theme is then explored through a sequence of variations. Pradhan draws a precise distinction between the two great expandable forms: in peshkar the player may bring in bols, the spoken syllables of the drum strokes, from outside the theme, while in qaida the challenge is to use only the bols the theme already contains.

The Benares gharana does it differently. Its players, Pradhan writes, begin instead with an utthaan, which may run across several aavartans, or cycles, of the taal, exploring different metrical patterns. Unlike peshkar, the uthan is a fixed or spontaneous piece rather than an expandable one, and it ends with a tihai, a phrase played three times to land exactly on the point of resolution. This is worth knowing before you form an opinion about a performance: an opening that sounds emphatic rather than meditative may be a stylistic choice inherited through a lineage, not a player rushing.

The long middle: qaida and rela

The heart of most solos is the qaida. A theme is stated, and then turned over: fragments rearranged, phrases inverted, the same material re-examined from a dozen angles, each variation closing back onto the cycle. It rewards patient listening in the same way a raga alap does. If you find yourself thinking that you have heard this phrase before, you probably have, transformed.

A rela is built from the same theme-and-variation logic but composed for speed, and the effect is meant to be continuous and flowing rather than declamatory. When a solo appears to accelerate into a blur, you are usually hearing this shift of form, not merely a shift of tempo.

The punctuation: tukra, paran, chakradar

Shorter set pieces sit between the expandable forms. A tukra is literally a piece: a compact composition, often a cycle or two long, that ends in a tihai. A paran is longer and heavier, its vocabulary drawn from the pakhawaj, the older barrel drum of the dhrupad tradition. A chakradar takes a tukra or a tihai and plays it three times over, so that resolution is postponed, then postponed again, then finally delivered on sam. Audiences often react audibly at that moment. Now you know why.

Gharanas: what is documented, and what is lore

Each style is called a gharana or baaj, named after the town its founder came from. Pradhan describes two broad approaches: band or bund baaj, the quieter closed style, and khula baaj, the more open and resonant one, differing in repertoire, technique and sound production. The Delhi gharana, widely regarded as the fountainhead, represents the closed style and is traced to Sudhar or Sidhar Khan Dhadhi in the first half of the eighteenth century.

The Benares gharana is traced to Pandit Ram Sahai (1780 to 1826), who is said to have been a disciple of Makkhu Khan of the Lucknow gharana, though Pradhan notes that some sources attribute him to a different Lucknow lineage. The gharana also handles the instrument differently: its players usually place the baayaan, the bass drum, with the black syaahi turned towards them, so that the sound is bent by rubbing the wrist across the skin rather than by changing wrist pressure, and the right hand''s ring finger sits on the daayaan in a distinctive way.

Beyond this, caution is warranted. Some widely repeated gharana origin stories, including foundation dates reaching back many centuries, sit uneasily with the tabla''s documented emergence in the eighteenth century, and the scholar James Kippen, whose work on the Lucknow tradition rests on years of fieldwork with hereditary masters, has himself observed that the word gharana only came into use for these lineages around the end of the nineteenth century. Where the archive cannot verify a founding date, it says so rather than choosing the more attractive version.

What the players say about it

Ustad Zakir Hussain has described the repertoire with disarming plainness: the material has been around for two or three hundred years, he told The Hindu, and what is new is how it is presented so that it resonates each time. Compositions he learnt from his father, Ustad Alla Rakha, who learnt them from his own father, are now played on the mridangam and the dholak.

Pradhan has also written about how thinly accompaniment is usually described, noting that critics tend to dispose of the tabla player in a single line with an adjective such as adequate, competent or excellent. A solo recital is the one setting in which that habit is impossible.

Where to hear one

Two performances with clearly credited musicians are a good place to begin. Supreet Deshpande''s 2017 Darbar Festival recital at Sadler''s Wells, accompanied by Milind Kulkarni on harmonium, is in Teentaal and moves deliberately across lineages: it opens with a peshkar in the Farrukhabad manner, takes up a Delhi gharana qaida attributed to Ustad Amir Hussain Khan, and includes a Benares composition of Pandit Kishan Maharaj. Rimpa Siva''s full 2007 Darbar concert in Leicester, with Sandeep Mishra on sarangi, is also a Teentaal solo and runs seventy-two minutes, long enough to hear a complete arc unfold.

For a studio recording with the form labelled track by track, Aneesh Pradhan''s album Tabla: The Solo Tradition, with Ajay Joglekar on harmonium, presents Peshkar, Qaida, Rela, Gat, Chakradar and Tukda in sequence, all in Teentaal, with a twenty-six minute qaida at its centre.

Continue exploring

Follow the lineage through the archive: Pandit Ram Sahai and the Benares line, the Lucknow inheritance carried by Ustad Ahmed Jan Thirakwa, and the playing of Pandit Kishan Maharaj, Pandit Samta Prasad and Pandit Kumar Bose. Then listen again to any solo you already know, and count nothing at all. Just wait for the melody to come round.