Zakir Hussain, the world's foremost tabla player, graced the Boulder Theater with his remarkable talent on Sunday night.

Tarbell the Magician once commented, “Please note that, at no point during the performance, does my hand leave the end of my arm.”

Tabla master Zakir Hussain, a magician in his own right over a spectrum of percussive sounds, might have used the same defense the other night about half way through his performance at the Boulder Theater when a voice on the P.A. system broke above the music and matter-of-factly announced, “It’s 10 o’clock.” Hussain shrugged his shoulders to the audience, as if to say, “That wasn’t me.” Besides providing incorrect information — it was only about 9:30 p.m. —the presence of this disembodied recorded voice offered little to rival or distract from the extraordinary performances the audience had already witnessed.

The night opened with Hussain’s brother, percussionist/composer Taufiq Quereshi, providing a study in the rhythms of the human breath. “The breath is life,” he said, and maybe just to prove it, performed a few inhalations and exhalations over the microphone that, save for the extreme chain smoker among us, most people could pull off without too much mental or physical strain.

But from here, Quereshi left us mouth breathers behind. The array of respiratory percussions he weaved together played out in a number of beats and tones. The 1-2 hip-hop rhythm resembled beat-boxing performed with breath instead of voice. The crescendo he constructed at the end of the piece approximated a steam locomotive chugging across the stage.

The Motilal Dhakis from Bengal then marched through the audience to the stage playing their large orange and red processional drums. Their celebratory dance-like style of drumming usually accompanies festivals and weddings in Bengal. That the drummers could even reach the bottom skins of the unwieldy barrels with their drumsticks made the playing all the more remarkable.

Though he’s the foremost tabla player in the world, Hussain made his way to a darkened stage as is customary for him, avoiding the big entrance. Even to those familiar with tablas — consisting of a “dayan” wood drum for the right hand and a “bayan” bass metal drum for the left — it’s difficult to describe the variety of tones Hussain produces on the instrument.

With his right hand, he “twangs” like a stringed instrument, perhaps a bass or the three-stringed Japanese lute called the shamisen. With his left, he often scratches like a DJ on the bass drum to get a variety of lows, from deep thuds to hollow bubbling echoes. The interplay corresponds to sung syllables called “bols,” which a tabla student might typically have to study for a year before even touching the drums.

Ganesh and Kumaresh, twin violin virtuosos, dominated the second half of the show. Playing instruments specially tuned for Indian scales, the brothers tied together prolific runs in both honeyed and haunting tones. Master percussionists Navin Sharma on the dholak and Sridhar Parthasarathy on the mridangam accompanied the violinists with rumbling solos.

When the whole cadre of musicians came on stage to play the final song together, the orchestral effect left the audience wanting more — nearly three hours after the night began. It was proof this level of musicianship moves people no matter what time it is, 10 o’clock included.

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Denver-based writer Sam DeLeo is a published poet, has seen two of his plays produced and is currently finishing his second novel.