David R. Courtney

He was born in 1953 in Houston, Texas. He went to Texas A&M University in 1972 to study Bio Engineering. However midway through this training he switched to music. In this regard he moved to the San Francisco Bay area and enrolled in the Ali Akbar College of Music in 1974. Here his teachers included the late Ali Akbar Khan and Zakir Hussain. He moved to India in 1976 to continue his musical training. There he spent a number of years learning tabla under the late Ustad Shaik Dawood Khan of Hyderabad.  He is also well versed in dilruba, and esraj. He married Doordarshan vocalist N. Chandrakantha in 1978. He has performed on stage, TV, disk, and radio, in India, Europe and the United States.  He has accompanied many great musicians including Lakshmi Shankar, and Pandit Jasraj. His articles have appeared in “Modern Drummer” and “Percussive Notes”. He, along with his wife, have received numerous awards. David was also politically active.  He spent a number of years engaged in street-level activism, then moved into the Democratic Party.  From there he shifted to the Green Party, where he made two unsuccessful bids for the Texas State Senate (2012, 2014).