“You see these old traditions that are being forgotten,” concertgoer Bardia Mizani CM ’28 said. “To see someone that’s young and is keeping a tradition alive, it just made me really happy, honestly.”
On March 5, students and music enthusiasts lined the wooden pews of Pomona College’s Bridges Hall of Music for a performance of South and Central Asian folk music. Musicians Homayoun Sakhi and Salar Nader, masters of the Afghan rubab and tabla, respectively, sat cross-legged on a carpeted platform under the stage lights.
The rubab is a twenty-one-stringed lute-like instrument. The Taliban’s complete ban on music has made it nearly impossible to practice the rubab in Afghanistan, where it remains the country’s national instrument, according to Nader.
“Music about Afghanistan is like completely a question mark these days,” he said.
Pomona music professors C. Joti Rockwell and Arash Khazeni, of the music and history departments, respectively, helped organize the concert. Rockwell also hosted Sakhi and Nader in his music theory courses.
“We’ve collaborated before between departments, so this was another opportunity to do that,” Rockwell said. “[Khanezi] mentioned these musicians to me and the prospect of having them here for a concert and a residency, and we were delighted to do it.”
The week before the concert, Nadar and Sakhi hosted master classes for Pomona music students. Students were invited to learn from the visiting musicians by improvising with them and marrying the sounds of their instruments.
“Holding a nylon string guitar today alongside the rubab, there’s quite a contrast, but it was cool to be able to put them together in some way,” Noah Strauss PZ ’26 said. “There’s so much to understand about the lineage of this music.”
“Our mentors’ music is always alive and we’re out here representing as best as we can,” Nader said.
Just before beginning, Nader delicately dusted a light covering of chalk over his hands before playing his three tabla hand drums, which were made from metal with goat skin stretched across the top. The drums can handle up to one thousand pounds of pressure and produce a wide range of deep echoes, depending on how Nader strikes them. The practice of playing the tabla, according to Nader, is incredibly physically demanding.
Nader described how music is often played after breaking fast during the Holy Month of Ramadan, with the rubab and tabla sometimes taking a central role in the evening celebration. The two musicians explained that performances in Afghanistan often last through the night until the early morning.
Sakhi and Nader have been performing the rubab and tabla in a concert series at American universities. The duo’s fame is certainly large in their genre, both men being classically trained through the traditional ustad-shagird apprenticeship in their respective instruments.
Nader’s mentor, Ustad Zakir Hussain, was the first man to introduce Indian classical music to a global audience. He is revered as one of the greatest percussionists in the world and won three Grammy awards in 2024. Born in a musical family, Sakhi apprenticed with his father, Ustad Ghulam Sakhi.
The duo uses their distinct instruments to combine classical compositions with improvisation, always paying homage to both cultural influences in their concerts.
“Our mentors’ music is always alive and we’re out here representing as best as we can,” Nader said.
Sakhi began the performance on his rubab. Nader shortly joined Sakhi on the tabla, riffing off the melody of the rubab after waiting to see what Sakhi chose to play.
“Watching the interplay between them, the way they would bounce off each other and vibe off each other… the energy between them was super cool,” audience member Elias Pluecker PO ’28 said.
Sakhi and Nader periodically increased the tempo, their hands moving frantically faster and faster across their instruments. The rhythm quickened until the two musicians abruptly stopped playing, lifting their hands from the instruments as the concert hall filled with applause.
“I grew up with my dad and my dad’s friends playing tabla in the house. I think my favorite part [of Sakhi and Nader’s concert] was the large buildups when they would create a lot of tension and end with a big bang,” audience member Sinan Walji PO ’28 said. “I remember being kind of jaw-dropped when I saw that as when I was a kid, so it was kind of [like my] memories.”
Sakhi and Nader tried to give the audience a complete picture of the cultural influences at play, describing the Central Asian roots of the Pashto song they ended on as “Central-Asian hillbilly” and highlighting classical Indian ragas and talas.
The audience became a part of the concert, clapping along as the music swelled.
“We ask you to clap along into the room,” Nader said. “Find that feeling of ecstasy, I hope.”
Sakhi and Nader have set out to spread the music of the rubab and tabla to college campuses.
Of her favorite part of the performance, concert-goer Somya Singh PO ’28 said, “I’d say the way the audience kind of could get involved with the music and engage with it.”
Sakhi and Nader’s concert combined traditional instruments with a new audience. The joy and life the pair brought to their music seemed to follow audience members beyond the walls of Bridges Music Hall.
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