Sejal Kukadia: Drum Major

An almost casual interest in the sound of the tabla led Sejal Kukadia on a journey that took her around the globe and evolved into a lifelong passion. Today, she is a teacher at the New Jersey-based Taalim School of Indian Music, an author and one of the only women in the United States who is a classical tabla soloist.

"I'm the only musician in my entire extended family," Kukadia says. "I have an older brother and an older sister and they both are settled down with family and kids. My brother is a doctor, and my sister is a pharmacist and she's married to a doctor. It's a typical Indian thing to be a doctor or an engineer, so I'm the one in the family who took a completely different road. It was very different and hard for my family to accept in the beginning. It took some time, but now they are very supportive and very proud. My mom has eight siblings and my dad has four siblings. They are all in India, and they all have kids and their kids have kids. In my entire extended family of I-don't-know-how-many people, I'm the only one who chose music."

While growing up in Latham, NY, outside Albany, Kukadia developed an interest in the music of the tabla. "I didn't know much about the tabla, but I was very attracted to the sounds. My parents took me to classical Indian music concerts, and then I started to go to professional concerts in New York City. I dabbled here and there, but then I decided to get serious and take formal lessons."

Sejal Kukadia

Kukadia, who was a student at Binghamton University in upstate New York at the time, used a summer break to travel to India in search of a teacher. This was not a decision to be taken lightly. Kukadia says, "When you pick a teacher, you are dedicating yourself to someone who you will learn from all your life." After months of fruitless searching, Kukadia was introduced to her teacher by happenstance. While sitting in a dance school playing her tabla, she met a woman whose son was studying the instrument. "She said to me, 'If you want to learn tabla, what are you doing here? Come with me,'" Kukadia recalls. "She took me on the back of her scooter. At this point, I had been almost frustrated with the fact that I had not found what I was looking for yet, and it had been more than two months into my trip to India. I was a little bit doubtful but willing to take the risk." The risk paid off because that was the day that Kukadia met her tabla master Pandit Divyang Vakil, to whom she reverently refers as "Guruji."

Kukadia continues, "She took me to his house. As I walked in, he was seated in a small room on a chair and in front of him was a seven-year-old student of his, sitting on the floor and the child was playing so good. Guruji said, 'Sit down,' so this woman and I sat down and observed, and within seconds I knew in my heart that I had found my guruji and from that point on I started taking lessons from him. I had found this teacher, who I found to be incredible and willing to teach me the depths of where this instrument can go. Like I said earlier, I didn't know too much about the instrument, but after meeting him, within days, I realized that this instrument is so much more. It can go so in-depth. It's not only incredibly technical compositions that you can play, but you can go into incredibly complex time signatures, rhythms and variations. There is so much history to it and so much authenticity to it and so much beauty to it and the speed that you can go with your fingers. The musicality is just mind-boggling. I was just so taken in by everything and, to make a long story short, I moved to India, I got my own apartment, and I went into a full-time intensive study of this instrument for four years."

To finish her final credits at Binghamton, Kukadia arranged with a music professor to allow her to devise her own project. She says, "I could study tabla in India and collaborate with [the professor] through the mail to receive these eight credits for studying abroad. I sent many a cassette to him by mail and wrote a paper and got the eight credits and graduated on time so it really worked out well."

This led to a collaboration with Guruji. She explains, "The interesting thing is that when I was writing that paper, I would talk to Guruji and get information for this essay and then he would look at it and correct it and things like that. Through that process he said, 'We should continue writing about tabla and put it into a book in English and this will be a textbook for tabla.' Tabla has a lot of history and back in the day when my teacher learned ... and before that, the [composers] were very secretive about their compositions because they regarded them as their own. And so certain styles of tabla music, certain compositions were kept in a tight circle, so the way tabla has been passed on through the generations was orally because nobody wanted to write any of this down on paper because that would document it and enable other musicians to steal.... Music was just passed on from teacher to student, teacher to student for generations. My teacher had the idea of writing a full-length textbook, all things tabla from A-Z, from compositions to the biographies of great masters of yesteryear, the rules of playing solo tabla, the rules of playing accompanied tabla. Now, I'm the author of that book, Tabla Taalim. I would go to sit with him in the mornings and he would teach me the material. Sometimes we would spend hours listening to recordings; sometimes we would watch videos and he would explain to me what was going on in the video. It was a pretty tedious process of me learning the materials and then going to my apartment in India and writing it all out, studying it in a way and then writing it in a way that other music lovers in America will understand. About two and a half years ago, we published it and we sell it to all of our students. It's one of my accomplishments that I'm proud of."

She is also proud of what she sees as tabla's emergence into the mainstream. "Tabla is one of the world instruments that is becoming very popular. Just the other day, I watched a Shakira video and in the background there was a tabla player. Commercials on TV—very often I hear tabla in the background. The other day I was listening to a radio commercial for a very mainstream product and clearly tabla was the background music for the whole commercial.... I'm happy about it, and I'm not all that surprised. I think tabla has a very unique sound and it's very beautiful, so I'm not surprised that people are getting attracted to it the same way that I did all those years ago. We have a lot of students who are American. We have Sunday practices and in that Sunday group practice, I'm the only Indian person." Kukadia predicts that an ensemble known as Tabla Ecstasy, will help draw in more tabla audiences when they come to America in 2010. "They are ones to watch," she says, "Go check them out on YouTube."

Kukadia also draws high praise. "She is very committed to proliferating the art, be it through her wonderfully written tabla textbook or teaching," says Heena Patel, who is also a student of Pandit Divyang Vakil. "She's a loving teacher and an inspiration, especially to young female tabla students."

Asked about the rest of her life, Kukadia, who now lives in Long Island, freely admits that music is always at the center of it. "I'm a member of a Jewish music band," she says. Kukadia performs with Divahn, an all-female ensemble that plays Middle Eastern and Sephardic music. She reports, "We've traveled all over the country and a couple of summers ago we went for one single concert in Poland."

As for the future, Kukadia says she is just focused on teaching and continuing to practice. She says, "When you are taken on as a student of tabla, then you are required to do tabla all day and practice, put in many, many hours. You are required to refrain from doing anything that will divert your mind. That means not really visiting with friends and family, just going for your lessons morning and evening, and in the afternoon you spend for practice. What I always say to people is when you learn tabla in this way or any classical Indian instrument in this way, when you dedicate yourself to the instrument and to your teacher, you are not just learning the instrument, you are learning a new way of life. I'm not talking about the students that I have here—that's just a normal one-day-a-week-come-for-your-lesson-and-then-go-home kind of thing. I'm talking about when a student really decides to become a tabla player as a career—when they decide to devote their life as a classical musician. You become part of a family also in which the head of the family is your teacher and the members of the family are all his students. It's such a very special type of training. It's a lifelong process."

For more information on Kukudia, go to the Taalim School's Web site at: www.taalim.com.

Elaine G. Flores is a New York-based writer and editor, who specializes in covering beauty, style and entertainment.