Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: “He remains an enigma, to this day…what was that magic?”

Of all the many ancient and modern genres of South Asian music, qawwali (the music of Sufis or Islamic mystics) would’ve been considered the least likely to achieve global popularity; its appeal is mainly driven by lyrics – mystical verses by poets in Farsi (Persian), old Hindi and other South Asian languages. Ever since the genre was first invented by the 13th-century mystic-poet-musicologist Amir Khusrau, it has been widely practised at the tombs of past Sufi masters in India and Pakistan, essentially as a religious event, and performing, or even listening to, qawwali has remained a communal worship ritual of the Sufis for almost 800 years. Even more curiously, while it was typically performed by an ensemble with several vocalists, only one man, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, was to emerge as its solo international superstar.

Qawwali was well received by Western audiences when the Sabri Brothers, at the time regarded as Pakistan’s top qawwali group, performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1975, but when Khan came on the Western scene a decade later, the global impact was seismic, influencing countless musicians and expanding the reach of qawwali internationally.

A legend in his lifetime, Khan’s fanbase has grown even larger since he died in 1997, with record companies frequently releasing posthumous albums ranging from studio outtakes and compilations to re-releases of greatest hits – Discogs lists at least 150 albums released since his death. The recent discovery of four recordings in the archives of Real World Records – a company that played a pivotal role in Khan’s career – is exciting in that it also features a previously unheard number. Recorded in 1990, when Khan was at the height of his powers and perched on the threshold of being catapulted to unprecedented global fame, unimaginable for a qawwal (performer of qawwali), these recordings are being released in a new album, Chain of Light. Its producer, Michael Brook, who also mixed the album with engineer Craig Conard, confirms that these recordings reach us exactly as performed by Khan and his qawwali musicians without the addition of any other musical or technical enhancements. “There is an amazing clarity to these performances,” Brook says. “They are more harmonically adventurous than the other songs that Nusrat was recording at the time and the whole group is playing incredibly well, firing on all cylinders!”

In Pakistan, before Khan’s international fame, qawwals were not generally regarded among the top tier of musicians and while qawwali had always had a large following, some sections of orthodox Muslims and their clergy consider Sufis to be heretics, even though Sufi musicians mainly invoke the name of Allah and the Prophet Mohammed alongside singing verses from the Sikh holy book as well as some Hindu devotional songs. But even among those who didn’t have these extreme views and where qawwals were highly regarded, it was more for the fact that they were performing a religious duty rather than for their musical prowess.

Descended from a long line of qawwali musicians – his father Fateh Ali Khan and uncle Mubarak Ali Khan were the most famous and successful qawwals of their time – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a formidable figure physically and musically, was already a star in Pakistan during the early 1970s, particularly in rural Punjab where his repertoire was drawn largely from the mystical verses of scores of Punjabi Sufi poets. These early 1970s performances were mainly formatted as religious events in keeping with the Sufi system of qawwali where music combined with poetry is said to have a natural progression of its own and is linked to specific rituals which translate into a transformational listening experience. For instance, when a listener is overcome by the music and enters a deep trance – a frequent occurrence at rural and also certain private gatherings – the lead qawwal is trusted to be trained in how to ease the intensity of the song, or a particular line, so that the afflicted person can gradually regain consciousness.

Khan’s popularity in Pakistan received a boost with the arrival of the cassette tape. His early Pakistani recordings contained just one or two lengthy numbers, with Khan mainly focusing on reproducing some of his father’s greatest hits, notably ‘Haq Ali Ali’, rendered in his own style, which instantly became a greater hit than the original. Muhammad Ayyub of Birmingham-based Oriental Star Agencies (OSA) was pivotal in promoting Khan’s work. He remembers how their relationship began: “In 1977 we were introduced to an artist from Pakistan through Hidayat Ullah who used to record for us. We were brought two 10” records of a concert from Pakistan. We were listening in our office on a Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder… and when we played it, we said ‘Woah, what a heavenly voice.’ … Everybody went into a trance-like vision and that was the first introduction to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice. I said ‘We must introduce this voice to a wider world.’ And that’s how we released four cassettes in the Asian market in 1978 – there were no LP records or anything like that.” Khan’s association with OSA led to several hundred more cassettes which became widely available and could be heard blaring out from tractors, trucks and rickshaws. But these recordings, which carried no notes or song information, were still mainly aimed at the home market and the South Asian diaspora who would find these in Indian-Pakistani grocery stores as opposed to music shops.

At the same time, qawwali was emerging as secular musical entertainment in both India and Pakistan, and Khan, like most other qawwals, found himself wearing two hats – continuing to perform qawwali as a religious observance for small devout groups at Pakistan’s many Sufi shrines while at the same time performing at high society weddings and other social occasions where the pay was good but audiences ate, drank, smoked and chattered throughout the recital.

Khan had always maintained that whatever the performance context, he was delivering a spiritual message – the Sufi message of love and unity – and regardless of whether it was at a Sufi master’s tomb or a party, even if one person in a thousand felt spiritually elevated by his music, then his job was done, which was, in his own words, “to reduce the distance between the creator and created.”

His OSA recordings were equally popular in India where pre-partition memories of his father were still fresh. He was invited there in 1980 – his first performance outside Pakistan – to sing at the wedding of the son of Raj Kapoor, an Indian film director/actor, in the presence of many high profile musicians and poets. Reportedly, guests initially welcomed him with indifference. However, they were soon praising him as Shahenshah (Supreme King)-e Qawwal. The performance ran from ten at night to seven in the morning. In the years that followed, numerous Bollywood films brazenly lifted some of Khan’s original compositions as the concept of copyright didn’t yet exist in the sub-continent. But later, once Khan had reached global fame, he was reportedly paid vast amounts to sing and compose for Bollywood films. He even cameoed as himself in 1997’s Aur Pyar Ho Gaya, which had him lip-syncing to his own voice for a wedding qawwali sequence.

In fact, Khan was in India already when invited to the Kapoor wedding. He had arrived in 1979 to fulfil a long-standing dream, which he discussed in Jérôme de Missolz’s 1996 documentary Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: The Last Prophet: ‘After my father’s death [in 1964], I didn’t know what to do. I went through a very difficult time. Later, five or ten days after his death, I had a dream that my father took me to a place and asked me to sing. I told him I couldn’t sing. He said he would sing with me. He encouraged me to sing with him. So I began to sing with him. But when I slowly woke up, I was singing! I told my dream to my late uncle Mubarak Ali Khan and also Salamat Ali Khan. I described the place in detail and also the ambience. He identified it as Ajmer Sharif, a tomb where my father had often sung. He was sure that was the place!’ In India, he visited the shrine and was permitted to sing there, sitting in the exact spot he had dreamed about.

Khan’s first performance in the UK was in August 1980 at Digbeth Civic Hall (now Digbeth Institute). Ayyub was in attendance: “I was fascinated with the performance, but saddened that there were less than a hundred [people] to listen to this great show…The following week I invited [Khan and his party] to a cinema near my shop. The cinema could accommodate about 500 people but, believe me, on that night there were about a thousand people crammed in and Nusrat performed his first performance at such a big gathering in the UK… We took him around the country and invited him back in 1982, and again in 1984. Then in 85, we had a collaboration with WOMAD.”

The beginnings of Khan’s international fame can be traced back to this first appearance at WOMAD in 1985. Thomas Brooman, co-founder of WOMAD, discusses the performance in his book, My Festival Romance: ‘The highlight of the night came from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Party who took to the big top stage at midnight and then continued to sing for more than four hours, keeping a packed audience utterly enthralled. Grown men wept, they really did.’ Ayyub remembers: “It was midnight. Cold air was blowing under the stage. After about an hour, [Khan] said ‘I can’t carry on… My legs are frozen, I can’t sing.’ So I asked [the festival] to arrange something. They got cushions and blankets and some heaters… People were in a trance, they were fascinated. That concert lasted almost all night. When we left it was almost daybreak. It was the greatest introduction of any Asian artist to the mainstream.”

Following WOMAD, Khan appeared on soundtracks for Hollywood films like The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Natural Born Killers (1994) and Dead Man Walking (1995), gaining famous Western fans like Mick Jagger, Tim Robbins, Eddie Vedder and Jeff Buckley in the process, while remixes from the likes of Massive Attack helped him reach even more new fans. That being said, the qawwal’s movement into the Western mainstream and his exploration of new fusions were not without controversy. In Pakistan, some of Khan’s performances were cancelled as fundamentalist movements declared his music blasphemous according to sharia law.

Chain of Light’s newly discovered recordings sit within this period of international success. They were discovered when Real World were partway through moving their archives and checking for any unreleased material as they went along. One of Khan’s tapes was simply labelled ‘trad album’, which they had presumed was Shahbaaz (1991), but it became evident that there was an extra tape containing no track details that had another four qawwalis from that session which had never been heard. 1990 was an important year for Khan as it was also the year he was working with Michael Brook on a fusion project – the first of its kind – which was released as the iconic Mustt Mustt. “It was amazing to see Nusrat gradually absorb the concept of the studio as an instrument, rather than just a place for live recording,” Brook says about the album. “He was building a whole new creative outlet, with ideas for overdubs and production.” Brook and Khan would also collaborate on 1996’s Night Song, the last album released on Real World during Khan’s lifetime. “What he could do and make you feel with his voice was quite extraordinary and we were very proud to have played a role in getting him to a much wider global audience,” reminisces Peter Gabriel about the role that WOMAD and Real World have had in Khan’s career, adding: “It was a real delight when we found out this tape had been in our library. This album really shows him at his peak.”

Rashid Ahmed Din was Khan’s translator from 1985 and manager from 1987. Asked why he thinks Khan was able to have mainstream success, he answers: “It’s the musical knowledge of Nusrat’s family which made it easy for him to collaborate with Western musicians. That’s what made Nusrat unique. Plus, he was a genius, having such musical knowledge and creativity.” Video cassettes of some of his Western concerts clearly show why Khan stood tall among all other qawwals, with his unique style and unbounded energy and passion, punching his fists into the air and pushing the music to its limits with his eyes shut tight. Brook, reflecting on Khan’s early days and the impact the voice had had on him, confesses to still trying to figure it out: “He remains an enigma, to this day. I’m still trying to understand… just how and exactly what was that magic?”

Perhaps qawwali’s pounding drums and syncopated rhythms set up by the handclapping are so close to the ubiquitous rock back-beat of Western pop music that first-time listeners can easily feel at home yet be completely enchanted by its strangeness. However, the impact of Khan’s music was by no means limited to Westerners. For many younger generation diasporic Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, Khan was an exciting discovery of their cultural roots. Born and raised in Western Europe or North America, this generation would’ve had no memory of their grandparents regularly flocking to qawwali sessions back home. Even more significantly, it sparked a renewed interest in and respect for their native languages, most notably Punjabi (Khan had begun to sing more in Urdu only after becoming popular in South Asian urban centres and the overseas diaspora where Urdu serves as a lingua franca). This revival of Punjabi is probably Khan’s most underrated contribution to the South Asian diaspora’s linguistic culture.

And for those wondering if there are more unreleased recordings out there, Real World’s archives may now be accounted for, but there is still hope. Here’s Rashid Ahmed Din: “I believe there are a couple more recordings which Nusrat gave me copies of before leaving us for good. I will try to find those multi-tracks…”

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue, read the magazine online – subscribe today: magsubscriptions.com