Denise Nuttalldoing. She played with much emotion, intensity, and feeling. She played
with her soul and was not obsessed with playing fast as many other
tabla students I had met had been. She encouraged me to return to
California with her and get to know some of the tabla players in the
Bay Area communities.^6
Leen took me to Oakland to stay with her friends Tim and An-
drea. Andrea was a clothes and textile designer. Tim, then in his early
forties, had been bitten by the tabla bug fifteen years earlier. Origi-
nally a Western percussionist, he had taken up tabla playing first un-
der Ustad Allah Rakha Khan and Zakirji. Eventually, he connected
with and became a disciple of Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, a master of
the Lucknow gharana, at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Ra-
fael. When we first arrived at Tim’s house, there was much talk about
Leen’s trip to Canada and discussions about tabla. They acted like
brother and sister, laughing at each other’s jokes and teasing one an-
other. Tim and Leen had met in Mumbai many years before, during
the winter concerts.
Tim and Andrea lived in a Victorian-style house. It was spacious
and had wonderful high ceilings. The neighborhood consisted mainly
of lower-rent housing. The house was unusually large and grand in
comparison. Across the street stood the local Baptist church, where
on a Sunday morning we would awake to the choir’s soulful calling
of the Lord. Tim had constructed a magnificent tabla room in the cen-
tral part of his old Victorian house on the first floor. It was here that
he taught his private students and where many tabla players would
gather and practice or perform for each other. There was always much
tabla activity in the house from morning to night. Each morning Tim
woke us up by softly playing a kaida. In the late morning and early
afternoon, he taught classes, and later we practiced alone and then
together. When we passed each other in the hall or gathered in the
kitchen away from the tabla, we recited compositions for each other,
counted them out, or talked of instrumentalists, concerts, and peo-
ple in the music scene.
It was in this house where I first met Zakirji’s students Peter and
Dorothee. Dorothee had come from Germany for the summer months
to study tabla. Peter, an “all ’round” musician, had been playing