Alla Rakha sits ramrod straight, radiating the stillness of meditation - hands covering the tabla motionless up to the elbow, but beyond the wrist the fingers are a blur and beats fly fast and furious. An occasional stroke rises sharply against the backdrop of this breathless roll, punctuating the monotone and emphasizing the critical points of the beat. Now it is a straight rhythm, now one bol and then another, and now it is fractured into a hundred pieces, stacked up randomly in seeming defiance of rhythm, only to rendezvous magically at the inspired moment of the som. Non-musicians in the audience wonder at the ease with which this fragmentation, the bane of their musical attempts, is vanquished effortlessly to produce yet another variation on the sixteen-beat cycle. Suddenly Alla Rakha stops and points at Zakir Hussain, but Zakir has caught the cue even before the hand could be lifted, and he is now creating his own cascade, taking off seamlessly from where his guru and father had stopped...

Sultan Khan plays impassively on the sarangi - as Zakir has said in the introductions, accompanying for the tabla solo is essentially a menial task, but Sultan Khan has graciously agreed to do the job this time. Gone are the wild exultations of the pre-intermission play, for now the lead instrumentalist is reduced to the role of backdrop drone. Through all the rough and tumble of the rhythm he perseveres with a simple soulful tune, occasionally shaking his head at the end of a particularly vigorous segment. He is a fat man, and his dark pockmarked face is not of the kind that radiates confidence in dark alleyways at night. When he first sat down to play, I overheard a remark how he resembled the goonda leader in Hindi movies. But once he starts playing, he gradually gains dignity, redeeming his appearance with the subdued exuberance of his fingering. For me, he ignites with the very first movement of the alaap, ending a straight note with a furtive detour, and gradually the frown on his face relaxes and is suffused with the spirit of the music.

Like Zakir Hussain, Sultan Khan also had his initial training from his father, the late Gulab Khan a noted sarangi player and vocalist. Sultan Khan also is a trained vocalist, and he surprises us in the second number of the evening by leaning into the microphone and beginning a slow mellifluous lori - a lullaby, accompanying it himself on the sarangi. The sarangi is a bow instrument, prehistoric cousin to the violin, but it is shaped like an ungainly box, and the tonal quality is different - it has the resonant strings of most Indian instruments yet the sound is shriller than the violin.

What really holds the show together and accounts for the sold out status of the show is not the lead instrument but the tabla duo - Zakir Hussain and Alla Rakha. Zakir is now at the height of his powers - having gathered all that blossomed in his father's garden, he has also gleaned the pickings from all the gharanas of India. He has discovered new potentials for the baya, the base percussion usually played by the left or baya hand. By carefully applying pressure with the base of the hand while playing the strokes with the fingers, one can alter the pitch generated by the baya and thereby even play tunes, as Zakir demonstrates frequently, especially in his SPICMACAY concerts. Earlier today, in the opening piece with Sultan Khan, he displayed this rhetoric in the Jugalbandi, matching the instrumentalist not only in rhythm but also almost in tune. Underlying all this experimentation however, is his exceptionally strong traditional training which has given him strokes that are sparklingly clear and distinct, and even through the rapidfire rolls on the tabla one can make out the clear notes and the staccato highs. Like all good artists, he knows not only when to create a sparkling high, but also when to taper off into quiet competence, as in the second piece, the soft lori, when he was content to be just the tabla player. The quintessential showman, his performance is a wonderful blend of playfulness and virtuosity that leaves audiences in rapture. His physical appearance is also an asset. A handsome man, he is forty and it is rumoured that his head full of curly black hair is white under the dye, but more than the physique it is his exuberance, a reckless joie de vivre, that cuts through the years and makes him the young man that he is. Ultimately, he blends a magic aura - the successful talented man who has managed to remain the truant adolescent that every escapist longs to be, and his stage presence is a study in delight.

Alla Rakha on the other hand, is conservative, and his style is undoubtedly a truer reflection of the Punjab Gharana tradition. His baya is much more subdued than Zakir's but his tabla is as sharp and the cascades roll off as fast as his son's. His sense of humour shows through even in his playing, when he glides in the spurious coquettish beat into the rhythm and melds it immediately back to the whole. Yet his playing lacks the gusty appeal of his son's; perhaps there is something about the base notes of Zakir's baya strokes that resonates deep within the recesses of the human soul, or perhaps it is that Zakir has a wider palette, or maybe it is just that Zakir handles the microphone better. On the whole it is clear that the audience enjoys the son more than the father. If you listen closely, both bayas have a good bit of modulation, but Zakir's comes out booming from the speakers, distinctly rising, falling and tapering off, while Alla Rakha's is essentially a background patter. But there is no doubt as to hierarchy within the artists - Alla Rakha sits in the middle, with Sultan Khan to his left and Zakir to his right - a spatial statement of status that brings out the unalterable Indian veneration for experience and age. After the intermission, Zakir and Sultan enter first, and someone has set up a tabla pair in the center of the dais, covered by two discreet pads, and then Zakir announces his father - "Ustad Alla Rakha, whose play is just beginning to blossom in this, his seventy-second year."

One aspect of this that I find fascinating, is that it brings into the dying decade of the twentieth century the ancient "tapovana" tradition of Indian education, where the student lives at the house of the master and learns at his feet not only the subject at hand but also an attitude, a manner of life as important as the art itself, a tradition of veneration and service and acceptance that breathes life into the art and establishes its bounds. Both Zakir and Sultan had father as guru, a more restricted instance of this theme.

It is easy to imagine how many years ago, father and son have played this very gat, endless hours in some dark room with fan whirring overhead and the damp air of Bombay heavy outside the grilled-bar window. Somewhere, a doubledecker bus goes by belching black smoke. A light drizzle starts, and the sun sets into the ocean beyond the tenements. But there are no time bounds on this endeavour, no limits set by the modalities of returning home, no anxious parent awaiting the prodigal child. The word that describes this extended effort, "sadhana", has no precise translation in the western world, either in vocabulary or in concept; perhaps the extent of self-denial implied is contrary to the spirit of individualism.

This is the tapovana ideal that Tagore tried to resurrect in his idyllic ashram at Shantiniketan, an experiment that has lost much of its vigour since his death, ambushed on its path forward by the gigantic shadow of the master himself. More insidiously, the tapovana system has been undermined by the ease with which ideas are preserved and communicated in the twentieth century; the rigour and precision of the oral tradition has been replaced by the pedestrian intransigence of the e-mail interaction. But even now, in these highest reaches of art, is there not still that subtle something which defies definition and calls for the delicacy of face-to-face give and take?

Compared to his egregious son, Alla Rakha is simply not dramatic enough for today's fastpaced life. He has no body language, no languorous humour oozing into the microphone, no dramatic display of flying hands and hair - his is just the plain straight excellent art of tabla. To the ice cream connoisseur, the choicest ice cream is the pedestrian vanilla - but made to perfect proportions, from the real bean, with the right balance of cream, flavour and texture. All flavourings are but a mask over an inferior kernel. This recalls one of Tagore's lyric poems "Ganbhanga" -

gAhichhe KAshinath nabin jubA,
gAnete shabhAgriha dhAki
kanthe khelitechhe shAt-ti sur,
ShAt-ti jeno poShA pAkhi.

(Young Kashinath's voice smothers the king's hall,
the seven notes like seven well-trained birds in his voice.)

In contrast to Kashinath's exuberant performance, the old master Barajlal falters and fails at his turn, but the old king has ears only for Barajlal. In the end, the two old men are left alone, the courtiers having left on various pretexts, and they entertain one another with their music and their tears.

The analogy is inept here, perhaps. Today's old master, Alla Rakha, is as surefooted as ever; very far from faltering. The two tablas are set to different notes, Zakir's being a little higher, but what makes it easy to distinguish their playing is their style. Sometimes though, especially in his solo soft passages, why is Zakir keeping the occasional beat at the soms? Is it sheer exuberance, or is he just tuning the tabla as he is sometimes wont to do? Or is it that he senses a faltering unperceived by us? At the very least, it seems impertinent.

There is a surreal floating quality to today's experience, a dichotomy in time and space that envelops this event like a frame. The picture inside is intensely Indian - the guru and his foremost disciple are performing together in what is profoundly an Indian event, to an audience that is also Indian, but their Indian-ness is a luxury, a welcome respite from the days of endless effort to blend in, to be as American as the next person, to transform to the norms of an adopted culture, to wear an identity like a shell, to accept and be accepted. This frame is an opposite colour, an arresting contrast: outside the hall are the joggers and the sunbathers and thousands of football fans a few blocks off in the Rice University stadium.

At the end of the show, we will spew forth into the Houston night, congregating in small turbulent eddies and dissipating slowly. Later, at home over dinner we shall discuss what a marvelous show it was. The picture will be swallowed by the frame, and we will return to our normal lives, bearing but a fragile memory, yet another decaying link to something that we once were. What shall we have for dessert - the supermarket brand ice cream - chocolate? - Yes, that will be good enough, thank you.