Ustad Zakir Hussain Allarakha Qureshi commonly known as Zakir Hussain was a famous Indian tabla player, composer, music producer, percussionist and film actor. He was celebrated as one of the greatest tabla players of all time. He passed away on December 16 2024, at the age of 73 in San Francisco due to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. In 2024, he made history, by winning three Grammy Awards in a single night, including Best Global Music Performance, Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, and Best Instrumental Composition, becoming the first Indian musician to achieve this feat.

He was born on March 9, 1951, in Mumbai, India. His father, Ustad Alla Rakha was one of the legendary tabla players. He started his musical journey at an early age, he gave his first concert at 12, which was the beginning of an illustrious career. He holds a graduate degree from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai.

Zakir Hussain’s career extended beyond Indian classical music. He had collaborated with famous international artists and contributed to cinema. He played on an album of George Harrison's Living in the Material World (1973), John Handy's Hard Work (1973), Van Morrison's Into the Music (1979), and Earth, Wind & Fire's Powerlight (1983), Planet Drum (1991), which won the first-ever Grammy for Best World Music Album in 1992 and Global Drum Project (2009), which earned another Grammy for Best Contemporary World Music Album.

Talking about cinema, Hussain showed his skills as a composer, performer, and actor. He composed the scores for some of the best films ever made, such as Ismail Merchant's In Custody and The Mystic Masseur. His tabla added depth to the scores of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha. His work in the Malayalam film Vanaprastham (1999) received international recognition through awards at the Istanbul and Mumbai Film Festivals. Zakir Hussain was married to Kathak dancer Antonia Minnecola, and they have two daughters, Anisa, a filmmaker, and Isabella.

Zakir Hussain also featured in documentaries such as Zakir and His Friends (1998) and The Speaking Hand: Zakir Hussain and the Art of the Indian Drum (2003). He also appeared in the Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust (1983), blending acting with his role as associate music director. His legacy as a cultural ambassador who blended Indian music with world art forms.

Zakir Hussain had earned many prestigious awards, such as Padma Shri (1988), Padma Bhushan (2002), and Padma Vibhushan (2023), with the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1990 and Fellowship in 2018. In 1999, he became the first Indian to win the National Heritage Fellowship from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. Hussain was a founding member of Bill Laswell's world music supergroup Tabla Beat Science.

In addition to his performances used to conduct workshops at prestigious institutions like Stanford and Princeton Universities as a dedicated educator . His contributions were recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award from SFJazz (2017) and the Kyoto Prize (2022) for cultural enrichment. Nasreen Munni Kabir compiled 15 interview sessions with Zakir Hussain, conducted between 2016 and 2017, into the book Zakir Hussain: A Life in Music (2018). The book offers an intimate journey through his early years, rigorous training, and evolution as a musician.

BOOM has debunked misinformation around Zakir Hussain. BOOM fact-checked a viral video claiming to feature late Indian tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, who passed away on December 15, 2024, due to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. BOOM found that the artist in the viral video is Pakistani tabla player Abdul Sattar Khan, popularly known as Tari Khan, performing during a 2011 show in Washington DC alongside Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.