The life · the whole journey
Tabla Maestro · Teacher · Performer in London
One life, told from a closed schoolroom door in Brahmanbaria to a border crossed with no passport, five years at a guru's feet, and at last a royal stage in London.
Age 7
Yousuf Ali Khan was born in Brahmanbaria District, in the green river country of what is now Bangladesh. His formal education began at the age of seven, when he enrolled at Bagmoniram School in Chittagong.
Two years later, at nine, he transferred to Bishnopur Primary School in Comilla. At twelve he moved on again, to Ananda High School back in his home district, and it was there, for the first time, that music came looking for him.
Age 12
The school held a music competition. Fifty children auditioned for just ten places, and Yousuf was not chosen. The disappointment might have ended the story there.
Instead he went straight to the source, appealing directly to the school's music teacher, Ustad Adil Hussain Chand Mia. Something in that stubborn devotion moved the teacher, who agreed to take the boy on and teach him to sing.
Age 12
Under Ustad Adil Hussain the lessons reached beyond the voice. His teacher also kept a local instrument repair shop, and Yousuf was allowed to stay after class and help, learning by hand how every drum and string was built. He spent long afternoons watching his teacher compose and arrange, absorbing the bones of melody and structure.
And in the quiet, when the music room lay empty, he would sit at the tabla and play, showing a natural feel for rhythm though no one had yet taught him a thing.
Age 13
Recognizing that gift, at thirteen Ustad Adil Hussain arranged for Yousuf to take proper tabla lessons from a local player known as Fulmia. Around the same time he began to keep company with Ustad Afzalur Rahman, a blind sarod master of the community.
Rahman took the boy under his wing completely, feeding him, guiding him, seating him on stage as an accompanist at local gatherings, and introducing him to other regional musicians. Watching Fulmia and Rahman play, Yousuf knew that rhythm and percussion would be his life.
1976
While studying with Fulmia, Yousuf caught a radio broadcast of the celebrated virtuoso Ustad Alla Rakha. The command in that playing settled something in him, and he resolved that music would be his life's calling.
In 1976, Ustad Afzalur Rahman took him to a concert in Brahmanbaria by the visiting maestro Ustad Bahadur Khan. Afterwards Yousuf found the courage to speak to him and confessed his dream of travelling to India to study. The invitation came warmly, but it could not be taken: the boy had neither the money nor a passport.
December 1976
That December he decided to go anyway. He had spent six months saving from odd jobs, and he left home carrying a single jute bag: a lungi, undergarments, a shirt, and a pair of cheap sponge sandals. With no passport, he crossed the border into India by pressing two packets of cigarettes into a guard's hand.
His first refuge was Agartala, where a former Brahmanbaria tabla student took him in and gave him a proper shirt. Unable to travel under his own name because of local restrictions, he became, for a while, "Poltu Mukharjee". He sheltered among hay bales beside the cattle, and after three days went on by train, three days more, until he reached Calcutta with nothing but his clothes and that jute bag.
1977
In the city he sought out Ustad Bahadur Khan, who happened to be passing through. The shared roots of Brahmanbaria opened the door at once, and the maestro welcomed Yousuf into his home, arranging for him to study under Pandit Anil Bhattacharjee, a professor at Rabindra Bharati University.
His days found a rhythm of their own: household chores for the professor each morning, one to one tabla each afternoon, and evenings at Bahadur Khan's residence, practising beside the maestro's sons, Kirit Khan on sitar and Bidyut Khan on sarod, and at times with Dhyanesh Khan, a son of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. Two years passed this way, and a foundation was quietly laid.
Early 1978
In early 1978 Yousuf returned to Bangladesh carrying a letter of recommendation from Bahadur Khan to the national television channel. The endorsement won him work as a tabla accompanist for visiting Indian classical artists on televised recordings.
Bahadur Khan also introduced him to his elder brother, Ustad Abed Hossain Khan, and to Abed's only son, Ustad Shahadat Hossain Khan. With Shahadat, Yousuf formed a friendship that would last a lifetime, and the two practised five to ten hours a day and soon began to perform together.
November 1978
In late November 1978 the two friends were invited to play for Bernard Zagorn, the UNDP Resident Representative in the country. It was the first high profile engagement of Yousuf's return.
Zagorn was struck by the young tabla player, by the seriousness of his playing and the steadiness of his devotion. That single evening set in motion a chain of kindness that would carry Yousuf all the way back to a master's door in Calcutta.
1978
Zagorn welcomed the two musicians back to his residence for an informal recital, and a few days later invited the young tabla player to dinner. Half in jest, Yousuf asked whether his host might help him secure a visa to study in the United States.
Zagorn refused, insisting that the artist must earn his own way. But he did not simply turn the young man away. He promised instead to find Yousuf an honest road to the training he longed for, and to watch over his family himself while he was gone.
1979
True to his word, Zagorn approached India's Ambassador to Bangladesh, Mr Muchkund Dubey, to request a cultural scholarship. At first the embassy hesitated, for such scholarships were reserved for principal artists, vocalists, sitarists and dancers, while an accompanist was not thought a primary recipient. Zagorn pressed on regardless and won an audience.
A few days later Yousuf arrived at the Indian Embassy in Dhaka in his only clothes, a torn shirt and trousers, carrying the quiet resolve of a man determined to learn. He was received with such warmth, with tea and snacks and genuine enthusiasm, that the kindness moved him to tears. The ambassador referred him to Mr Biswas, the official in charge of cultural scholarships, who completed the paperwork and granted him both the visa and the scholarship.
1979
Asked how he wished to study, Yousuf did not choose an institution. He chose the guru and shishya tradition, the old bond of master and disciple, built on verbal teachings, close mentorship and total immersion.
He asked to study under Pandit Shankar Ghosh at the Shankar Ghosh School of Music in Calcutta. Over the years that followed he gave himself entirely to the tabla, deepening his command of rhythm, improvisation, and the stylistic signature that defines a gharana.
1980
He took up residence again with Ustad Bahadur Khan and his sons Kirit and Bidyut, who helped him find his feet in the city's musical world. Soon his friend Sagar Guha, whose family worked in the Bengali film industry, secured him a spare house in Baliganj, and there Yousuf lived for five years.
Every day he sat for one to one lessons at his guru's home, and the hours around them he filled by accompanying visiting masters, listening, and watching technique he could not yet name. From time to time Bernard Zagorn came up from Dhaka to see how the boy he believed in was getting on.
March 1984
In March 1984, his scholarship complete, Yousuf came home a finished artist. His reputation drew a stream of invitations to perform alongside the leading vocalists, instrumentalists and dancers of Bangladesh, and he took a post as a tabla accompanist for Bangladesh Television.
Then two letters arrived. One came from Ustad Aashish Khan, a son of Ali Akbar Khan, inviting him to teach tabla in Tokyo. The other came from the Leicestershire School of Music in the United Kingdom. He asked Bernard Zagorn for counsel and chose the British post. Zagorn observed, gently, that the door to the wider world Yousuf had once asked him to open, that evening over dinner years before, had swung wide at last, only by a road neither of them had foreseen.
September 1984
Yousuf arrived in Leicester on the eleventh of September 1984 and began teaching at the Leicestershire School of Music. Over the next year he built programmes for young people and made friends across the British arts scene.
There he met the dancer Pratap Pawar, guru to Akram Khan, whom Yousuf himself would later teach. A thread of the tradition he had carried out of Bengal was already weaving itself into the life of his new country.
1985
At Easter 1985 he toured the United States with Shahadat Hossain Khan, playing in Texas, Detroit and New York, the two friends carrying their music across another ocean.
That July his time in Leicester came to a close, and he turned south, toward London, where the next thirty years of his life were quietly waiting for him.
September 1985
In September 1985 he joined the Inner London Education Authority, then part of the Greater London Council, and took up a place on the staff of Thomas Buxton Primary School in East London.
There he built community workshops, and there he met the woman he would marry later that same year. He stayed at Thomas Buxton for five years, drawing the first rhythms out of a new generation of children.
1990
In 1990 Yousuf joined the Brent Music Service, and he would teach and lead workshops there for thirty years, until 2020. For three decades, thousands of children took their very first lesson in rhythm from his hands.
All the while he kept a full diary of concerts and tours, carrying the tabla from school halls to concert stages and back again, never once letting the teacher in him stand apart from the performer.
1993
In 1993 he began a long collaboration with Tony Haynes and the Grand Union Orchestra, and the tabla walked into jazz and world fusion as though it had always belonged there.
The bols answered the brass, the bayan leaned against the double bass, and the spoken rhythms of Bengal found a new and unexpected home in the swing of a modern band.
1995
Then, in 1995, came a night few musicians ever know. Yousuf shared a stage with Paul McCartney of the Beatles.
A boy once turned away from a village music room now stood among the most celebrated names in the world, and still, every evening, returned to the same patient work of the hands.
Since 2000
Since 2000 he has represented Bangladesh on cultural delegations to the United States, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Iran, Iraq, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Italy, India, North Korea, China, Hong Kong, Russia, Sweden, Australia and Denmark.
Wherever the music travelled, it spoke the same first language, the spoken syllables of the drum, and rooms full of strangers found themselves keeping time as one.
2002
In 2002 he travelled with Grand Union from the south of England all the way to the Orkney Islands, playing major towns, schools, community centres and special needs programmes alike.
No audience was ever too small to deserve his whole heart. A hall of two hundred or a room of a dozen, each one received the same complete and generous music.
2019
And in 2019 he had the honour of performing before the then Prince Charles, now King Charles III, a final bow on a stage that had begun with a closed door in Brahmanbaria.
From that village schoolroom to a royal audience in London, across eighteen countries and half a century of stages, the whole journey was carried by one thing. Rhythm.
The whole journey was carried by one thing.
From a closed door in Brahmanbaria to a royal audience in London, across eighteen countries and half a century of stages, a single current ran underneath it all. Rhythm. Now the next chapter is yours to begin.