Pandit Vijay Ghate

Vijay Ghate grew up in what he has called "a simple middle-class Jabalpur family with a basic interest in music". His mother noticed his ear first. When he was three, he was thumping the floor in time to a song she was humming, and when she changed the song, he changed the beat with her. She got him a set of baby tablas, as he told The Indian Express in 2013.

He decided to play tabla for a living when he was thirteen, after hearing three days of concerts by Ustad Zakir Hussain. He calls Hussain the reason he took up the instrument seriously, and the musician who gave the tabla a celebrity status.

His guru is Pandit Suresh Talwalkar. The NCPA's concert note describes his training with Talwalkar. In a 2013 review of Ghate's playing in Delhi, critic Suanshu Khurana wrote that his thaap "many times" sounded specifically like his guru's.

Senior musicians ask for him as an accompanist. He is one of a handful of tabla players who accompany all three forms of classical performance — vocal, instrumental and dance — and he has said he finds dance the most demanding, "especially when Pt Birju Maharaj is on stage". He has had a long association with Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia. In Mumbai in February 2004, he accompanied Chaurasia in raga Durga before Jethro Tull took the stage, on their joint "Music Without Boundaries" tour. At the Delhi Classical Music Festival in 2013, he joined the jugalbandi of Chaurasia and Pandit Shivkumar Sharma at the jod stage of Yaman. That is unusually early for tabla. He played only the bayan, with a steady eight-beat pattern and phrases drawn from African drumming.

In January 2014 he was named among that year's recipients of the Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian honour. He presents a touring festival and ensemble, Vijay Ghate's Taal Chakra, which brings rhythm-led concerts to cities across Maharashtra and Goa.