Tag: farrukhfatehalikhan

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Night Song

Nusrat’s final collaboration with Michael Brooks opens fascinating new directions in sound.

Album of the Week, September 26, 2026

In retrospect, it’s amazing that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan took six years to follow up Mustt Mustt, his crossover qawwali + club album that he recorded for Real World with Michael Brook in 1990. Not only did the album do fairly big numbers—Real World has claimed over 600,000 albums sold, not counting sales in the Indian subcontinent—but the cultural impact was big, with reports that British youth in particular were turned onto more traditional qawwali music thanks to the album. But Nusrat was focused on his more traditional format, as we’ve heard, and it wasn’t until 1995 that Brook coaxed him back into Real World Studio to make a follow-up.

The plan was different this time. Brook learned from the first encounter that Nusrat’s best vocal moments happened in the middle of improvisational flights, some of which lasted an hour or more. So instead of constructing loops and trying to marry Nusrat’s music up to them, here Brook started with Nusrat doing lengthy improvisations and then built the tracks up from there. This meant that while some tracks still featured members of Nusrat’s party, including tabla player Dildar Hussein and harmonium player Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan, there were a few of the usual Real World suspects as well, including multi-instrumentalist Richard Evans, bassist Mick Karn, and Senegalese percussionists Masamba Diop (talking drum) and Kauwding Cissokho (kora), as well as session musicians James Pinker (drums) and Jo Bruce (organ, drums, woodwinds). The overall sound is quite different from both Nusrat’s traditional material and Mustt Mustt, but still recognizably Nusrat.

“My Heart, My Life” foregrounds some of the musical differences introduced by this new method. The kora, played by Kauwding Cissokho, calls back to the guitar that featured in Nusrat’s early recordings on Love and Devotion and gives the opening a spare, delicate sound. Nusrat’s vocals respond to it, being less full throated than when he is fronting the party. Diop’s talking drum is here less full throated than the normal tabla but provides a strong rhythmic foundation over which Nusrat builds a multi-tracked, chantlike chorus. There’s a subtle bass throb underneath the otherwise placid surface, and Nusrat erupts above the top just once, for a run that brings the brilliant edge of his voice forward.

“Intoxicated” builds up over a foundation of electronic strings and percussion from Brook’s synths, joined by Jo Bruce’s Hammond B3 organ. Once long ago, I trashed the Charlatans (UK) for using the noble Hammond as a rhythm instrument, but that’s exactly the role it plays here, running alongside Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan’s harmonium in a slow shuffle with Mick Karn’s bass and the drum loop. Nusrat again is in a lower vocal gear, but still gives us some sangam runs against the loping beat. The result: plenty of vocal pyrotechnics, lifting the track from a mere groove to something more… well, intoxicating. Gradually the groove falls away to just Nusrat and the harmonium, landing the number mid-thought.

“Lament” is just Nusrat and James Pinker’s drums (sludgily distorted by Richard Evans’ effects) with Brooks’ infinite guitar laying soundscapes around them. He performs a modal chant that is tonally reminiscent of the shuffling “Allah, Mohammed, Char, Yaar,” but which dissolves into the slow waves of guitar. “My Comfort Remains” rises up out of another shuffle of electronics, Nusrat’s voice shifting from major to minor on the chorus and moving around the blue note on the verses. We get a sustained set of improvisations in parallel on the raga over the bed of electronics, but just as it seems likely to take off into infinity, the kora rises up with a countermelody that takes us down from boiling, keeping things at a simmer as Nusrat improvises a series of rhythmically shifting vocals that Brook aligns in space around the listener, surrounding us with a Nusrat chorus.

“Longing” opens with a wistful guitar that could have been on a Daniel Lanois record, over a trembling reverb. Nusrat and the harmonium step forward in the sound then fall back, only to surge forward again over a gentle patter of drums that is gradually joined by Dildar Hussain’s tabla. The longing is unresolved, the whole song pivoting around the transition from the third to the fourth and back, some nasty guitar work swirling around the fourth as Nusrat ramps up to something like full volume in double-tracked chorus vocals into the outro, until suddenly the guitar halts as if a plug were pulled.

“Sweet Pain” opens with an intro that sounds a lot like it came from the Sling Blade soundtrack, several years before Lanois released it. But after the intro, Brook shifts the song into a minor range as Nusrat joins, improvising over the slow burn of the instruments until suddenly he takes flight. The ensuing vocal improv feels a little like the vocal flight of “Mustt Mustt,” but settles back into the ambience at the end.

The title track, “Night Song,” is just a drone from Brooks and some light keyboard work under Nusrat’s voice as he explores an augmented minor scale. The combination of the drone and voice lends an oceanic feel that is at once earthy and mysterious. A different sort of mystery, a melody that takes us around the notes of the raga, opens “Crest,” its simple descending scale picked out by the bass as Nusrat’s voice flies into a full impassioned melisma. But here comes a drum beat, and suddenly we’ve resolved up the octave for a moment as we reach the crest of the harmony, and finally fall back down to the fifth, settling just above that opening descending scale. The combination of that incredible voice and the insistent guitar riff underneath sounds like nothing Nusrat had ever recorded before. You can practically hear the tectonic plates shifting at the birth of a new sound. But as quickly as it comes, it settles back down into the liquid sounds of the guitar, fading out.

The collaboration between Brook and Nusrat reached new territories on Night Song, and one can only speculate where else they might have gone together. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wonder. Nusrat recorded with Brook in 1995, and toured through much of 1996 (including the show I saw in Washington DC in August that year). But he was slowing down. The following summer, having been ill for months, Nusrat flew to London for treatment of liver and kidney problems, then was rushed to a nearby hospital where he died of a sudden cardiac arrest on August 16, 1997, just two months shy of his forty-ninth birthday.

With Nusrat’s passing, a phase of Real World’s development ended, though new records didn’t; there were untold hours of his recordings still in the vault, and releases like the 1985 WOMAD recording have allowed fans to continue to be enthralled by his vocal acumen. There’s even one more that we’ll get to in this series, in a few weeks. But next time we’ll listen to an even more experimental album from another Real World artist.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Following Nusrat’s death, a collection of remixes of Nusrat/Brook recordings by Asian DJs, Star Rise, was released later in 1997. Here’s a remix of “My Heart, My Life” by Talvin Singh:

BONUS BONUS: One of the more noteworthy posthumous Nusrat tracks was his final collaboration with Peter Gabriel, a track that made its first official appearance on Peter’s 2002 Up album, but which had first been performed on a VH1 performance in 1996; Nusrat’s vocal on the song was taken from this appearance. The song was well enough known to fans even before its 2002 release that when Peter asked fans to vote for their top favorite lesser-known songs to be part of his 2001 WOMAD set, “Signal to Noise” made the cut. Here’s the 2002 album version, followed by the 1996 live one:

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Love and Devotion

Album of the Week, August 29, 2026

This week is another round of traditional qawwali music from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and it has a complicated release history. Originally there were two records, released separately in 1986 for WOMAD Records following Nusrat’s triumphal 1985 performance, Love Songs and Devotional Songs. These were rereleased on Real World following the 1992 liquidation of WOMAD as a standalone entity due to mounting debts.1 The records were subsequently combined on a CD under the title Devotional and Love Songs; it was this version that was in my collection. The first-time-ever vinyl reissue from earlier this year flipped the order, putting the love songs first.

Because the original performances date to 1986, the group is much closer to the 1985 WOMAD performers than the group that recorded Shahbaaz. Specifically, there are the usual suspects: Majahid Mubarak Ali Khan and Maqsood Hussain on vocals, Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan on vocals and harmonium, Mohammed Iqbal Naqbi, Asad Ali, Ghulam Fareed and Kaukab Ali in the chorus, Dildar Hussain on tabla, and two additional instrumentalists: Rahmat Ali on harmonium and Majawar Abbas on mandolin and guitar. The recording also features the young Rahat Ali, Nusrat’s pupil, who was only ten years old at the time.

The title of the record refers not only to its subject matter but also to the styles of music represented. The “Love” side is the traditional ghazal, an ancient (ca. 615-700) Islamic love song form that spread via the Persian administrative force of the Moghul empire into South Asia, where its primary language movedf from Persian into Urdu. “Woh Hata Rahe Hain Pardah” emphasizes the difference in form via its instrumentation, which here includes Abbas’ guitar in addition to the normal harmonium and tabla. Nusrat’s performance leans heavily on the repetitions of the melodies with the chorus, with occasional moments of vivid improvisation.

The guitar opens “Yeh Jo Halka Saroor Hae” as well, with some unexpected harmonies and articulations. The poet writes about love as intoxication, literally: “Your bewitching looks intoxicate. I have turned to drink and am in a constant spell.” If the title sounds familiar, it’s because it was this song that Jeff Buckley essayed a surprisingly competent performance of in the extended Live at Sin-É, but he didn’t work from this recording; he appears to have had a copy of a 1988 Nusrat album that was released under the titles Greatest Hits Vol. 3, Yeh Jo Halka Halka (in a 1991 German release), and later Intoxicated Spirit. The arrangement here is different; after the guitar intro and the first statement of the tune, the party improvises on the bridge of the tune rather than the opening lines. In the last two minutes, Nusrat’s improvisation takes off, engaging a third melody that he uses to bring the party back to the start.

A more contemporary song, “Biba Sada Dil Morr De” unusually starts in a minor key, as Nusrat pleads, “If you cannot remain before my eyes, please give me back my heart”… a universal trope. The performance gives room for Nusrat to stretch out on some higher sangam improvisations, and the other members of the party get some high lines as well. Nusrat also inserts a long section of single-note syllabary that becomes a more traditional scale-wise improvisation, and he and the party “trade licks” through the end of the performance. Another version of this can be heard on Live at WOMAD 1985.

“Yaadan Vichhre Sajan Dian Aiyan” is a traditional Punjabi song lamenting the death of the beloved. Here the mandolin puts us into the minor key, but most of the work is done by the party, who navigate the downward chromatic direction of the melody with ease. Nusrat’s improvisations negotiate the tone row of the piece with his customary blistering pace, but other members of the party add their own flavor with extended melismas and other improvisations. It’s Nusrat’s last scalewise melody that is the most dramatic, though, comprising an augmented minor progression that he rips through twice before returning to the main melody with the party.

Not all the ghazals are about romantic love. “Sanson Ki Mala Pey,” another traditional Punjabi song, talks about a woman whose love for Lord Krishna intensifies so much that she loses her own identity and becomes incorporated into the divine. The opening melody improvises across the scale in the guitar with unusual leaps, and the party’s statement of the melody is unusual as well with an eighteen-beat melodic pattern, organized as six slow triplets. So there’s an unusual waltz feel to the song that, coupled with the unusual chord progression, lends the feel of a Western folk song. Until the party begins its high improvisation, you could almost imagine this track (with English words) as the closing song of a downtempo set.

The Devotional and Love Songs compilation excluded two tracks, one from each of the original albums, from its running order to fit within the limits of a CD. “Un Ke Dar Pen Pohchne to Payen” is one of these, the last track on the Love Songs album, here restored to the running order in the double album. The sunny major key melody, with its unusual use of the ninth in the melodic progression, cheekily conveys the spirit of the lover: “What shall I do when I reach my beloved’s doorstep? Don’t ask, for I shall not tell you.” There are multiple improvisational asides as the party navigates the song, and a slight accelerando conveys the eagerness of the narrator at least as much as the intensity of the party in their performance.

We are back to the devotional qawwali music with “Allah Hoo Allah Hoo,” previously heard on Live at WOMAD 1985. This recording, true to the reputation of Nusrat’s pre-Real World sets, is much briefer, limiting the amount of time each member of the party gets for their improvisation and resulting in a more focused, punchier performance. The addition of mandolin to the instrumentation helps to move things in a sprightlier direction as well.

“Yaad-E-Nabi Gulshan Mehka” is also given an upbeat reading, with Nusrat leading the way in quick rhythmic variations of the melody almost as soon as it’s stated. We’re in a major key, which seems appropriate for a song reflecting on the “fragrance of the garden of the Prophet Mohammed.” “Haq Ali Ali Haq,” which also appears on Live at WOMAD, starts in a more reflective mode but quickly picks up momentum as the party negotiates the intricate, turning melody. This performance provides a little more stretch room for the performers, with high solos from the party and some meteoric sangam from Nusrat. The party performs a circling take on the melody that moves up and down the scale. All told, though, one appreciates the truth of the reviewer who noted that Nusrat’s other Real World albums provided opportunities for magic to happen by letting the performance stretch out over fifteen or twenty minutes; as complex as this rendition is, it feels like the band is just getting started (and in fact the song is subjected to the indignity of a fade-out).

“Ali Maula Ali Maula Ali Dam Dam” is a devotional Manqbat (a song sung in praise to the Sufi saints) praising Hazrat Ali. Here it’s sung largely homophonically, with little of the extended improvisation in the first half of the performance and with alternating single-voice solos from the different lead singers of the party. There’s a truly dizzying bit of sangam in what sounds like triple-tongued rhythm from Nusrat near the end; if you listen carefully you can hear his young pupil Rahat, here only 10 years old and not given his own mic, singing along behind the master.

“Mast Nazroon Se Allah Bachhae” is the sole ghazal on the “devotional” half of the album. Here the form feels similar to his performance of “Kali Kali Zulfon Ke” on Shahen-Shah, with the qawwal and party intoning the chorus twice and then Nusrat interrupting the third repetition with the first of many solos. The party continues to provide call-and-response support throughout.

The final track, like “Un Ke Dar Pen…,” was cut for space from the 1992 Devotional and Love Songs compilation. “Ni Main Jogi De Naal” is a devotional song dedicated to the jogi or devoted seeker. With a bright opening on mandolin and harmonium, Nusrat and the party sing overlapping iterations of the devotional, alternating with solo verses that elaborate the story of the jogi. In the end they achieve the sort of liftoff present in the best Nusrat performances, engaging in a sort of collective musical frenzy that ends in a final tempo downshift and a last utterance of the chorus.

Nusrat’s next album for Real World was 1994’s traditional The Last Prophet, which has yet to see a vinyl release. He followed that with something less traditional, and we’ll get to that soon. Next time, though, we’ll hear from one of his Real World labelmates, who had already made his world debut through a collaboration with Peter Gabriel.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: This two-hour Channel Four program presents a live 1993 Nusrat concert from London, highlighting the diverse and very large crowds that Nusrat’s traditional qawwali music was bringing during this time.

Footnotes

  1. The liquidation resulted in consolidation, as the WOMAD assets were subsequently acquired by the Real World group. ↩︎

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Shahbaaz

A mesmerizing collection of traditional and modern song from the great qawwali master.

Album of the Week, August 8, 2026

If you’ve just done a big crossover album, as an artist you have an implicit choice: do you continue mining that vein, coming closer and closer to pop? Or do you return to the music that made you famous? Following the success of Mustt Mustt, one imagines this was a choice facing Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at some point. After all, the album, and his appearances at WOMAD and other Western festivals, were gaining him increasing fame. But his choice was to double down on the traditional repertoire that had been his life, and he released Shahbaaz, an album with four tracks of traditional qawwali music that, as the liner notes by Pervais Khan observe, take us “on a quest to find new and even more daring paths to the sublime.”

The album, as before recorded in Real World’s Big Room, features many of the members of Nusrat’s party, including his brother Farrukh, long-time tabla player Dildar Hussein, and his young student Rahat Ali, who once again both participates in the choruses and receives live instruction in the art of qawwali while the performance is underway.

“Beh Haadh Ramza Dhasdha” drops us directly into the mix, as harmonium and tabla give us six bars and Nusrat and the chorus immediately wordlessly improvise over the melody for another six before beginning the qawaali song. Nusrat and the party improvise vocal responses after the melodic intervals, until Nusrat interrupts the fourth repetition to climb the scale, inviting Rahat to follow. At around the three minute mark, Nusrat briefly pulls the song into a different mode before bringing it back, and the song continues in this manner, with the party continuing in a more traditional fashion while Nusrat continually interjects in different scales and patterns, illustrating the message of the song, “He manifests Himself in many forms.”

We’ve heard “Shahbaaz Qalandar” before, in that 1985 WOMAD performance. This rendition runs about three minutes longer, partly due to a longer harmonium introduction and partly due to Nusrat’s interjection of additional lyrics in several places which are then picked up and elaborated by the party. The party works into a frenzy at the end with a chant of “Ali, Ali,” but doesn’t engage in the overlapping chorus lines that made the prior live version so fascinating; it’s still a riveting performance.

“Dhyahar-Eh-Ishq Meh” is a modern song setting poetry of the twentieth-century writer Mohammed Iqbal; the tune is rhythmically complex and provides a good opportunity for Nusrat to engage in pyrotechnics in multiple scales. It isn’t two minutes before Nusrat turns the conventional minor tonality into something more modal and unleashes a blistering run; a minute later, he breaks the pattern with a series of low utterances on the tonic before doing a series of up and down runs. The “bridge” is two winding runs in that modal scale. At the end of the tune, Nusrat shifts the rhythm into a different world before bringing it back to the hypnotic main tune.

“Jewleh Lal” enters directly with the entire chorus singing the title to open the chorus: “Jewleh Lal, Shahbaaz Qalandar, your joyous disciples dance at your door.” Both “Jewleh Lal” and “Shahbaaz Qalandar” are hymns of praise to the South Asian Sufi saint and poet Sayyid Shah Hussain Qadri, who was popularly known as Lal Shahbaaz Qalandar (ruby-coloured, noble and divine spirit, spiritual man), with Jewleh Lal meaning the “red bridegroom.” Lal Shahbaaz Qalandar is one of the key Sufi saints, as is clear from the heights of ecstasy the party reaches through the repetition of the hymn over the nearly twenty minute running time of the song. It helps that Nusrat’s setting is catchy, major-key, and a combination of a simple scalewise melody and a high shout to the saint. The tune allows Nusrat ample room for sangam explorations as the party continues to anchor the performance with the repetitions of “Jewleh Lal Shahbaaz” on the high tonic. As each member of the party solos in turn, the tempo imperceptibly increases until the group settles to the final repetition, exhausted with the ecstasy of praise.

The album continues to be a favorite of mine, and I imagine other listeners, for the sheer unbridled ecstatic heights that the party reaches in both “Shahbaaz Qalandar” and “Jewleh Lal.” I know the latter was a favorite of many fans because they were shouting for it at the Nusrat concert I attended almost exactly thirty years ago, on August 3, 1996 in the Warner Theatre in Washington, DC. Nusrat’s tours would continue to emphasize his traditional material even as he collaborated on record with many other western musicians. We’ll hear more of both those musical directions from him before the series is over. But next week, we’ll check back in on what one of those Western musicians was doing all this time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: “Shahbaaz Qalandar” is likely one of Nusrat’s most-performed songs and there are many live versions available. This one comes from a historic open-air concert in New York’s Central Park that was held on August 14, 1993, and gathered a huge crowd, including some unlikely listeners (whom we’ll discuss later):

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Mustt Mustt

A legendary collaboration between the great singer and ambient artist Michael Brook that gave traditional qawwali music a new beat.

Album of the Week, July 26, 2026

We’ve heard several albums by the great Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, featuring the hallmarks of the qawwali tradition: accompanied by harmonium and tabla plus a chorus, extended introductions, vocal improvisation, performances stretching anywhere from eight minutes to half an hour. We’ve also heard him in modern contexts collaborating with Peter Gabriel and others. But we haven’t heard his traditional work directly adapted for a wider Western audience. That’s where producer Michael Brook came in.

We met Brook last week, as the producer on Youssou N’Dour’s Set. But the Canadian guitarist had been in the music industry for years previously, working as an engineer at Daniel and Bob Lanois’ Grant Avenue Studio, where he worked with musical polymath Brian Eno, composer Harold Budd, and U2 guitarist The Edge, among others. It was during this period that Brook invented a kind of infinite sustain device that allowed an electric guitar to hold a continuously sustained note.1 Brook had a background in ambient music through his collaborations with Eno, Budd and Lanois, and his ideas for this collaboration with Nusrat were twofold: bring some hallmarks of modern music to Nusrat’s sound, and explore what happened if you slowed down the pace and allowed Nusrat to just explore sound rather than perform with his customary vocal pyrotechnics. At both, Mustt Mustt succeeds admirably.

Brook brought a handful of Western musicians to the session, including bassist Darryl Johnson (Neville Brothers, Lanois, Bob Dylan’s Oh Mercy), engineer David Bottrill (Peter Gabriel), and percussionist James Pinker (Dead Can Dance), but members of Nusrat’s party including Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan (harmonium) and Dildar Hussein (tabla) were there as well.

“Mustt Mustt (Lost in His Work)” is a song of praise to the Sufi saints (“Upon my breath and in my intoxication is the great Qalandar…my worship and upon my breath is the great name Ali”) that is westernized with the interplay of Johnson’s bass and Brook’s guitar over the tabla and harmonium. What emerges is a mix of devotion and groove. It’s still fully recognizable as qawwali; Nusrat sets up the chorus, improvises vocally with the harmonium, unleashes strings of sangam syllables. But there’s that fat bass line throughout, interplaying with the tabla and harmonium to create something completely new. It’s also more concise than a traditional qawwali performance, thanks to Brook’s careful editing (though the liner notes indicate that Brook and Nusrat had to compromise on some of the edits so as not to affect the meaning of the traditional syllables).

“Nothing Without You (Tery Bina)” starts with percussion first, then harmonium, again bringing rhythm to the traditional Qawwali forms. There’s more of Nusrat’s chorus here, and the tune is slower and more deliberate than it might be in a qawwali performance. Brook’s guitar is used to add small amounts of harmonic complexity while still keeping the song anchored in its traditional form.

“Tracery” is where the ambient starts, with Brook and Johnson laying a gentle foundation upon which Nusrat builds up sound in dialog with himself just as the guitar builds up patterns on patterns in a hypnotic swirl. The liner notes observe that the form is complex, building on one cycle that has nine beats and another with eleven. Here Nusrat embraces the challenge, issuing vocal runs across the patterns. It’s a gorgeous collage of sound as Nusrat finds ways to bring more and more expressive vocal sounds into the mix.

“The Game” begins with sustained guitar tones that yield to a Western rhythm courtesy of a drum machine pattern that Peter Gabriel contributed. Darryl Johnson lays down a bass line on the Moog and plays piano to build the melodic core of the backing track. Across all of this is Nusrat’s improvised vocal, combining runs of syllables with soaring vocal lines.

“Taa Deem” is built from the interchange between Nusrat and his party on vocals over the harmonium, then with a complex rhythmic backing with Dildar Hussein on tabla, Michael Brook on the surdu, and James Pinker and Darryl Johnson on djembe. Brook also contributes some low searing guitar lines and the whole thing becomes a dark explosion of melodic interchange.

Brook and Johnson create a synthesized soundscape to open “Sea of Vapours,” against which Nusrat vocalizes low in his range. There’s no percussion, just multiple layers of drone. By contrast, “Fault Lines” builds from a hypnotic low vocal introduction into a rhythmic back and forth between a multitracked Nusrat and members of the party thanks to James Pinker’s percussion. There’s a wonderful bit at the end where all the percussion falls away and it’s just a gentle hint of Nusrat’s voice. “Tana Dery Na” feels like a continuation of “Fault Lines” on a simpler percussion line and with a more prominent guitar part, and with only Nusrat’s voice over the top.

“Shadow” is just Nusrat and harmonium, an extended sangam improvisation. It serves as a sort of extended prelude to “Avenue,” a group live-in-studio jam with Brook’s guitar, Johnson on clay drums, Pinker on djembe joining the harmonium and tabla. The three percussionists lock in on a groove while Nusrat and Farrukh reinforce each other and the guitar adds ecstatic high notes. It fades out just as Nusrat finds a new vocal pattern to throw into the mix. Someday there’ll be an extended anniversary edition of this album that restores some of the longer bits from this session that were edited out; I’ll be first in line.

Unusually for 1990, the album ends with a remix track. “Mustt Mustt (Massive Attack Remix)” is a dub-style remix that suspends bits of the original track in reverb, heavy percussion and synthesized bass, courtesy of the legendary Bristol collective a year before they released their debut album.

No one had combined East and West in quite this way prior to the release of Mustt Mustt, and the use of tablas with western sounds became a pivotal moment for British music, opening doors for many more musicians to mix Asian inspiration with the dance floor. It also raised Nusrat’s profile even further and gave him a wider base of fans and admirers. We’ll talk about some of the folks he influenced in the future and hear more music from him. Next week, though, we’ll hear from another artist who got his first exposure to Western audiences through Gabriel’s Real World label.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s a more traditional rendition of “Mustt Mustt” from WOMAD Yokohama in 1992. This is how I heard the work when I saw Nusrat and party perform in Washington DC in 1996:

Footnotes

  1. Brook made three Infinite Guitars: one for himself and one each for Daniel Lanois and the Edge. You’ve heard the sound of the Infinite Guitar on U2’s The Joshua Tree, including on “With or Without You.” ↩︎

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Shahen-Shah

Nusrat’s first Western album is an ideal representation of the sacred and secular art of qawwali singing.

Album of the Week, June 13, 2026

When it came time for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to record his first album for Peter Gabriel’s nascent Real World Records, he could have Westernized his sound—after all, he had just spent time in the studio with Gabriel on the Passion project. Instead, he and his party produced an album that was as accurate a representation of qawwali tradition that had ever been released, opening the door for Westerners to discover the tradition.

Nusrat was not new to being recorded; prior to 1989 and this session he had already released some twenty-eight albums, a few for EMI but most for small local labels, or for the French world music label Ocora. But listeners noted that “studio-recorded Nusrat [could] often feel rushed, as if the party was singing qawwali for the sake of the recording rather than for the sake of religious praise.” No such limitation existed here; this was full-throttle qawwali, with the group providing authentic examples of devotional songs as well as ghazals (romantic songs).

Part of the secret of the recording was the timing. The original Real World recordings were not limited by the running times of vinyl; by 1989 most releases were CD-first, and a project containing six tracks each stretching more than ten minutes was no longer out of the question. Unfortunately this led to some choices when releasing these recordings on vinyl, mostly at the time for the European market which continued to demand vinyl releases through the early 1990s. Today’s record is the 2017 reissue of the 1989 European vinyl release, and it omits two tracks, “Meri Ankhon Ko Bakhshe Hain Aansoo” and “Kali Kali Zulfon Ke Phande Nah Dalo.” The latter is probably my favorite Nusrat track of all time, so I was irked to find it omitted from this release; we’re going to talk about it in the bonus tracks.

“Shamas-Ud-Doha, Badar-Ud-Doja” opens with the instrumentalists: harmonium playing the melody of the hymn in praise to Mohammed, hand claps. Then Nusrat leads the party in a gathering tone, wordlessly outlining the tonic, the third and the fourth in an introductory vocalese before singing a rhythmic verse that loosely follows the main tune, followed by everyone entering on the chorus. Nusrat lets us know how it’s going to go when, at the end of the second chorus repetition, he easily rips a vocal improvisation an octave up. At the end of the fourth chorus, he lays down a series of 32nd-note runs. The other singers in the party contribute too; one of them adds a run around the fifth, another at the octave, and there are numerous places where Nusrat improvises in the middle range while one of the other singers provides a high obbligato above. (This record features vocals from Nusrat’s cousin Mujahid Mubarak Ali Khan and his brother Farrukh, as well as his pupil Kaukab Ali, as well as other singers in a chorus; the youngest pupil heard on Live at WOMAD 1985, Rahat, is not heard here.) About halfway through, Nusrat engages in some stepwise sangam improvisation and some rhythmic improvised vocal syllables, which are closely followed by the tabla and harmonium. The closing series of runs where Nusrat rips a series of 32nd-note patterns up the scale are simply awe inspiring.

“Allah, Mohammed, Char, Yaar” is a devotional chant to God, the Prophet, and the “four friends”—four Sufi saints whose graves are the site of pilgrimages and qawwali sessions. It’s also gnarly as hell. The melody syncopates from the second note and recovers the non-syncopated beat with three eighth notes, and those off-beats in the middle have me leaning forward into the beat all the way. It’s in the raga marwa, something like the Locrian western mode, meaning that it sits unstably between a major and minor feeling, and also meaning that the qawwal singer can explore both tonalities in the solo, a fact of which Nusrat takes full advantage. There is less for the party to do in this song, aside from some high obbligato late in the song; mostly they groove on the chant. And there’s a lot to groove on; Nusrat’s sense of the beat is impeccable, and he’ll seemingly fly off at random only to have an improvisation circle right back to the tonic at the start of the chant again, over and over again.

“Nit Khair Mansan Sohnia Main Teri” is a Punjabi love song: “My beloved, I have only one prayer, that you may live happily…Since I fell in love with you, I have forgotten about the whole world; I wish only to die at your feet.” You can hear a little more of the traditional raga sound in this one, as Nusrat and the party sing the introduction and then get to the chorus. Here you can hear the roles of the other singers in the party, as one specializes in singing descending wordless lines in a thin clear voice from the octave while another, with a stronger voice, provides more of a high tenor line above the proceedings. Nusrat’s incredibly resonant and vibrato-rich instrument essays rhythmic running lines throughout. This one is trancelike, perhaps because of the raga foundation combined with the relentless major key feeling.

Another love song, in this case a ghazal in Urdu, “Kehna Ghalat Ghalat To Chhupana Sahi Sahi” is a song of complaint about a lover who says one thing and does another. Even here Nusrat steps into moments of ecstatic crescendo; rather than sounding angry or exasperated this too is a moment to celebrate the musical world of qawwali. The extended series of solos on the syllable dil (heart) are a magnificent punctuation of the overall arc of the song. At the end of the song, we get the only decelerando in the whole album as the party slows to the final repetitions of the love song.

With his first album for Real World, it was clear why Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan had chosen this title: “Shahen-shah” means brightest star, and this was clearly a performance of a leading light in the qawwali tradition. The record opened the door for Western listeners to immerse themselves in an entirely new cultural sound world. Some, like Jeff Buckley, were awestruck by Nusrat’s vocal ability and sought to learn from him. Some heard exotic sounds and sought ways to bring them into Western music; we’ll hear examples of that later. And some took it as a cue to explore more varieties of non-European music. We’ll hear from another great musician who opened some of these same doors next time.

You can listen to the full version of this week’s album, including the tracks that didn’t make the LP version, here:

BONUS: Let’s talk about “Kali Kali Zulfon Ke Phande Nah Dalo.” I have always liked the track a lot; it appears on a mix I made just out of college and was likely one of the tracks I played the afternoon I met my wife (though it was Tuvan throat singing that was blasting from my stereo when I actually opened the door and met her). The tune of this Urdu love song is stated in the harmonium, which gets its own elaborate improvisation until Nusrat and the party join with sustained gathering tones. When Nusrat starts the chorus, we get an initial statement, a repetition tagged with an octave high emphatic tone, a third with a high obbligato, a fourth with Nusrat ripping a descending vocal line from the third above the octave. Then the party alternates singing the chorus statement with more obbligato from the other singers and elaborate improvisations from Nusrat. Starting about three minutes in he starts to essay some call-and-response verses. I learned a lot as a college just sitting and listening to all the ways he interrupted the flow of the chorus with solos, how his vocal lines reinforced or altered the tonality, and especially how he played with the meter of the lines. The stretch from around 5:45 to 6:20 is a masterclass in how to fluidly slip in and out of metrical alignment with the groove, particularly the triple sets of triplets which shift out of and into phase flawlessly. I can still put it on and listen to it all these years later, and discover something I’ve never heard before.

BONUS BONUS: Here’s “Nit Khair Mansan Sohnia Main Teri” live from the 1988 WOMAD festival, about the time that Nusrat was headed into the newly constructed Real World studio to record this album.