Pandit Yogesh Samsi

Yogesh Samsi was born on 17 November 1968 into a musical household: his father was the vocalist Pandit Dinkar Kaikini of the Agra gharana, and his mother Shashikala Kaikini was a singer and teacher who went on to head the music school at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Mumbai. His father also played tabla, and gave him his first lessons; in a 2018 interview Samsi recalled beginning to play at three, before any formal teaching began.

He then studied with Pandit H. Taranath Rao, a teacher known for his command of the Farrukhabad, Delhi and Ajrada styles and for his knowledge of rare taals. His long formation, however, came under Ustad Alla Rakha, with whom he trained for twenty-three years; through that discipleship he carries the Punjab gharana of tabla, and he has spoken of trying to bring the gharana and the compositions scattered by Partition back into view.

As an accompanist he has played with Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Ustad Vilayat Khan, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Ustad Rashid Khan, Pandit Ulhas Kashalkar, Pandit Ajoy Chakrabarty, Begum Parveen Sultana, the violinist Kala Ramnath and the dancer Pandit Birju Maharaj, and he has accompanied both Ustad Alla Rakha and Ustad Zakir Hussain in their own solo concerts. His solo playing has been heard at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, the Barbican in London, the Sydney Opera House and the Esplanade in Singapore, and he has been a returning presence at the Darbar Festival in the United Kingdom since 2006.

Teaching is a large part of his work: he has built a tabla curriculum of his own, taught in India and on annual visits to the UK, aimed less at reproducing fixed compositions than at giving students the tools to think inside the tradition.

Sources differ on when he started with each teacher. His own website says his father initiated him at four and that he later went to Taranath Rao; Darbar says he began at six with Taranath Rao and joined Alla Rakha at ten. All accounts agree on the sequence of teachers and on the twenty-three years with Alla Rakha.

What listeners tend to notice first is tone: a clean, singing bayan and a dayan whose syllables stay separate even at speed. The Punjab baaj he inherited from Alla Rakha favours long rela passages built on rolling, connected strokes rather than sharp detached ones, and his solos are laid out as architecture — a slow peshkar that opens the taal out, then kaida with its expansions, then gat and rela toward a tightly wound close. In accompaniment the same command is turned outward: he shadows a vocalist's phrasing rather than competing with it, which is why singers as different as Bhimsen Joshi and Ajoy Chakrabarty have kept him beside them.