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He's Got the Beat
Cassius Khan drums up notice
as the world’s only ghazal-singing tabla player
by Robin Roberts
Cassius Khan is living the dream. Almost literally. When the New Westminster musician was just six years old, he dreamed he was sitting in a very ornate palace, on plush carpeting under soaring arches. Before him appeared four glowing gurus who commanded him to sing and play the tabla. Khan was scared and confused: Who were these luminous apparitions, and how was he to fulfil their request? The gurus reassured him that they had come to guide him and teach him all he needed to know.
Khan awoke in a sweat, heart racing. He could not understand the meaning of the dream. When he told his parents about it, they dismissed it with a laugh. But the dreams kept returning, each one more vivid than the last. Again he confided his visions and again his family took a step back, eyebrows arched. So he kept his mouth shut. “I didn’t want people to think I was some kind of freak show, you know what I mean?” he says now.
Khan was born in Lautoka, Fiji, in 1974, and moved with his family four months later to Edmonton when his father, a ground engineer for Qantas Airlines, got a job offer from Air Canada. Growing up in the prairie city, Khan began humming ragas and beating on his mom’s pots and pans. On Saturday nights, his dad would take him and his sister to parties at a cousin’s warehouse, which had an open space upstairs. There, the adults would sing while his dad played harmonium and a friend played the tabla.
“It sounded like cats screeching to me,” recalls Khan of the simple folk songs. One day, the youngster noticed the friend had left his tabla at their house. He picked it up and began to play. His parents were stunned at how easily their son took to the instrument, with no training whatsoever — other than from his secret gurus, that is. True to their word, says Khan, the gurus in his dreams had infused his mind, body and soul with music.
But Khan’s destiny would take a detour. His family moved back to Fiji in 1983, when Khan was nine. At Andrews Primary School in Nadi, the young Albertan stood out — and for all the wrong reasons.
“I vividly remember the first day of classes,” says Khan. “Being from Alberta, I wore jeans, cowboy boots, and a cowboy-style button-up shirt. The other students could not stop staring at me. I don’t think they had ever seen jeans or a shirt like that, or my hair, which was longer than theirs because of school rules. I felt really self-conscious about that!”
Khan escaped his classmates’ critical eyes at the beach, where he would sit in the sand and strum his hands on his knees, his mop of black, curly hair bobbing in the breeze. “I would listen to the crashing of the waves and create melody and rhythm in my head,” he remembers. “I have always been fascinated by water. One of the movements on the right hand of the tabla, known as the dhire dhire composition, always reminds me of fish I would spot in the water with their wagging tails.”
One day, as he sought shade from the fierce Fiji sun under a banyan tree outside his school, a teacher heard him tapping his knees and singing ragas to himself. She asked him to come inside and perform for the class. He upended a plastic water jug, began to drum out a beat, and sang a classical song he had heard on the radio. “I only knew the main line, so I kept singing it over and over,” says Khan. One of his classmates complained, “Turn over the cassette, it seems to be stuck!” Khan laughed the loudest and from then on became part of the group.
At night, the budding musician was lulled to sleep by a different kind of rhythm. The family lived so close to the country’s international airport, passengers used to wave at him through the windows of the 747s as they came in for a landing. He became so attuned to the sounds, he could track each aircraft’s movements, its make and model, without rising from his bed. “People used to ask me, ‘Hey Cassius, has Air New Zealand landed yet?’ or ‘Has that DC plane taken off yet?’” he says with a laugh.
He used to imagine himself in the cockpit of those jet liners, and had every intention of becoming a pilot. But the gurus kept invading his dreams, even more so once the family moved back to Canada in 1987. “My interest in classical Indian music was overtaking everything else in my life,” he says. When his uncle, Ustad Rukhsar Ali, heard him play, he told Khan’s father, “Maybe he’d be a good tabla player.”
Ali himself had learned from the great tabla master Ustad Latif Ahmad Khan at the Delhi Gharana (school of tabla playing), so he knew potential when he saw it. Khan’s dad agreed to the lessons, as long as they did not interfere with his schooling. So every summer, Khan travelled from Edmonton to Vancouver, where his uncle lived, and learned the intricacies of India’s most famed percussion instrument. His uncle’s sister, the renowned ghazal singer Mushtari Begum, who died in 2004, was his vocal coach. Once he became comfortable around his aunt and uncle, Khan confided in them about his dreams. Rather than call him crazy, they told him, “These dreams don’t come to just anybody. You were destined to become a musician, to serve the goddess of music.”
His parents thought it was “cute” that their young son wanted to be a musician. As he grew up, however, they became concerned about his ability to make a living drumming and singing. “There were some conflicts,” Khan admits.
So, like a good son, off he went to university, majoring in English, while continuing to study with his aunt and uncle. His father, who by then had started his own diesel mechanics and hydraulics repair company, had hopes his eldest son would become a lawyer. But the pull of the tabla was too strong, and Khan decided to pursue his passion full time. To his relief, his younger brother was mechanically inclined, and happily took his place alongside their father. His parents eventually accepted his chosen path. “They’re proud of me now,” says Khan, “but it took a long time.”
Despite his natural talent and years of study with many masters, Khan still learns from his chacha. “I saw great potential in him,” says Ali, who has taught many other students over the years. “He was a very fast learner, very keen. He told me when he first came to me, ‘I’m going to be a professional, I don’t want to do anything else but play music.’ He was totally dedicated, the best of my students. And we still work on compositions together; there is always something new to learn.”
Khan is acutely aware of that, and he continues to practise up to 10 hours a day. “In my field, there’s no such thing as becoming good enough, because there’s so much to learn,” he says. Indeed, what Khan does — play tabla and sing ghazals simultaneously — is extremely rare, as each form requires deep concentration and many hours of practice. To produce the unique sounds from the tabla alone requires him to use his palms and fingers in certain, precise ways to apply pressure to the skins. The technique is so complicated that it requires such intense focus that other players find it too difficult to combine with singing. Khan’s ability to do both is so unusual, in fact, that masters in the field from India and Pakistan say he is the only one in the world they’ve witnessed perform the two together.
It’s a distinction Khan has tried to pass on to the 150 students he himself teaches, either online, one-on-one or in groups upstairs at East Is East restaurant in Vancouver, so far with little success. “There’s really nobody who can play tabla and sing, it doesn’t come for them,” he says.
You’d think a musician with such a unique talent would have amassed a fortune, but, at the beginning of his career, Khan’s naivete made him vulnerable to opportunists. When he recorded an album at the age of 13, his manager scooped the profits. A few years later, at the end of a long tour, he never saw a dime. “I’ve had a number of unscrupulous managers,” he laments. “ They’re everywhere. At that age I was very exploited by certain people. And every manager I’ve had so far has been not very good.
“But it’s such a strange relationship between the managers and artists. The last one would tell me, ‘Oh, you’re like my son’. You get sucked in to that, you’re trusting, but they just look for young talent to make money off.”
These days Khan handles his own bookings — and books. He hasn’t gotten rich off his work yet, but he says he does alright. He’d like to play more dates, but his genre of music has limited appeal. “Even the Indian community doesn’t support it so much,” he says. Still, he says he’d “rather be poor and do what I love.”
He’s able to continue that love through collaborations with other artists, like slide guitarist Ellen McIlwaine, who played with Jimi Hendrix, keyboardist and composer Stu Goldberg, and Dobro lap-slide guitarist Doug Cox.
“He’s a brilliant musician, a brilliant mind, extremely talented, and very open-minded and very versatile,” says Goldberg, with whom Khan collaborated on the 2006 album Dark Clouds. “Like me, he’s very spontaneous. When we work together we play off of each other, we improvise and we create things on the spot. He kept up with me through everything, which was very exciting because we didn’t have to do a lot of planning in advance. In fact, all the plans were for nothing because every time we performed it was different.”
Goldberg praises Khan’s unique ability to play tabla and sing ghazals simultaneously. “He’s a virtuoso player as well as a virtuoso singer,” he says.
These days, Khan is a member of the group Slide to Freedom, with Cox and satvik veena player Salil Bhatt. Bhatt is the son of legendary slide player and Grammy winner Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, who invented the Mohan Veena, a multi-stringed guitar widely used in Indian classical music. The trio has plans to tour Canada in June, then internationally after that. A studio CD will follow. Cox, also a renowned music instructor and author, says he first met Khan five years ago at the Calgary Folk Festival, and was instantly impressed by his talent.
“Cassius has studied his roots and what he does is very heartfelt, especially for the style of singing he does,” says Cox from his studio on Vancouver Island. “It gives him a step up amongst a lot of classical Indian singers, because he does it very well. And he puts a sort of modern edge on everything he does. Technically, he’s very good but he’s also got a lot of heart. If he were a jazz musician or even a folk musician he’d probably be way more recognized than he is.”
Cox says that by collaborating with Khan, Salil Bhatt and Bhatt’s famous father, he is learning a lot about the differences between Indian culture from India and Indian culture from Canada. “Cassius is certainly a Westerner. He’s well aware of the hierarchies and the cultures and how to act around musicians from India . . . but then when we work together in Canada, we just work like Canadians. It’s a whole different thing.”
When told of Cox’s comments, Khan clarifies: “Growing up in Fiji, our school slogan was, ‘Respect your mother, respect your father, and respect your guru.’ This has been ingrained in my soul . . . In our musical training, we are taught to respect our instruments and the stage, as it is the goddess of music who has given us this gift and this platform to perform our art on. I always bow my head and touch the feet of ustads and pandits of music, and I do so because I respect and admire the sacrifices they have made for the sake of music. In Western culture, this behaviour is almost non- existent . . . I think humility is lacking here in most artists.”
While he’s firming up his tour schedule for this year, Khan is enjoying down time with his wife, Kathak dancer and harmonium player Amika Kushwaha, who often accompanies Khan in his concerts, and vice-versa. “I also learn a lot of tabla compositions from my wife. Kathak is the North Indian classical dance form which is intertwined with tabla bols (notes) so she teaches me many different mathematical compositions. She is also my chief harmonium player and, thanks to her, I have learned many more nuances in melody for Indian music.”
Khan is also promoting his latest solo album, Mushtari, A Live Concert, which is a tribute to his vocal guru, his late aunt Mushtari Begum. “She was the one who shaped my voice and my understanding of ghazals and ragas. I was always singing when I was younger, but learning from Mushtari Begum was a life-enriching experience which will always be with me.”
His first classical performance in front of an audience, in fact, was alongside his famous aunt in Edmonton. “I was quite young, 13 or 14,” recalls Khan. “I’ll never forget it. It was a wonderful experience for me being on stage with my aunt for the first time. I was a little nervous because I was sitting with such a master of music, and she was very well respected in her field by her peers. I didn’t want to let her down. When I listen back on that recording I think, ‘Well, I actually didn’t do that bad.’
Khan’s uncle Rukhsar Ali says he and Mushtari Begum always had faith in their nephew. “He has always had big dreams, and one day, hopefully, they will come true,” he says. “He’s already there, but he needs a bigger break. Luck has to be in his favour.”
Meanwhile, Cassius Khan continues to hone his craft and work with his wife to “take this art and move it forward.” He says he’d love to continue to collaborate with as many different musicians and in as many different genres as possible. On his wish list are American banjo player Bela Fleck and Canadian song bird Celine Dion.
Well, he does have a way of making his dreams come true.
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