by John Storm Roberts
Sharma is a virtuoso of the santur, a hammered dulcimer of a kind found all the way from western China to Hungary. But he's more than simply a virtuoso player. He's the man who introduced it from the purely folk tradition to the classical canon and gave it a whole technical vocabulary as he did so. Zakir Hussain, who's well-known in the New Age-cum-Crossover world, is a genuinely brilliant classical tabla player. Here the two of them perform -- delightfully -- a piece combining two ragas, one meditative and one somewhat romantic. (59:31)