Tag: worldmusic

Sheila Chandra, The Zen Kiss

Chandra’s second album for Real World Records is both a magnum opus of the female voice and an instrument of alchemical transformation.

Album of the Week, September 12, 2026

Following Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices, Sheila Chandra continued her exploration of voice and drone, of the interconnections between breath and thought, of voice and listener. She noted in the original liner notes to The Zen Kiss, “My last album … illustrates crossing between different musics within a single vocal line. The Zen Kiss has moved on. The structure of my songs have become more challenging now that those connections have been absorbed into my sub-conscious.” What results on this 1994 album is a set of vocal performances that range from meditative drones to traditional songs to vocal experiments, that range from British folk song to Indian raga to soul music to kannakol vocal percussion, sometimes all in the same performance.

Even more than Weaving, the album is a solo performance, with only producer Steve Coe adding drones. As before, Chandra recorded in a Bristol studio and mixed the album at Real World Studios. But with all the similarities, there’s an important difference: instead of lyrics drawn from ragas and folk songs, here Chandra wove a series of stories about women and their roles that was positively revolutionary for pop music in 1994, to say nothing of world music.

“La Sagesse (Women, I’m Calling You)” is the most direct expression of this new lyrical focus. Singing an obbligato that starts out as a raga and turns into a soul riff, Chandra sings “Oh, women, whose wisdom is in dreams… where do I go to find images of woman woman-made?” The track is entirely unaccompanied, putting the focus solely on Chandra’s incredible voice, as she seamlessly blends ragas and soul improvisation. The track transitions directly into “Speaking In Tongues III,” another of the series of kannakol spoken percussion compositions that began on Weaving. Here Chandra explores both the tonal ranges of the percussion that the form imitates and a broad range of tempos and meters. She expands the types of syllables in use as well, with umlauts and other sounds helping to shape the release of the sound.

“Waiting” reintroduces drone accompaniment under Chandra’s song of anticipation: “Like a desert bloom I sit at your feet / Trolling for a raindrop to fall from your lips / Waiting to be awoken and born by your calling.” The song passages are alternated with ragas, explorations of the song’s tone-row. In Chandra’s vocal we hear an expression of love carried to reflection and ultimate unity between the singer and the beloved. At one point in the improvisation there’s a familiar melodic progression, outside the conventions of the raga, that recalls the melody of “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

“Shehnai Song” is a deeper drone work, in which Chandra uses pitch bending around the raga for a sitar-like effect. It’s a brief but striking fragment of a song, followed by “Love It Is A Killing Thing,” a British folk song ornamented with flourishes that are simultaneously rooted in traditional Indian and soul music. Here, as in “La Sagesse,” Chandra’s voice is left unadorned to maximize the impact of her amazing vocal control.

The last song in the series of kannakol performances, “Speaking In Tongues IV” is even wilder than its predecessors, using sung interludes, digital effects, and a cut-and-paste aesthetic to broaden the sound palette to its widest. Chandra has said that she could not have written this work without hearing what a sampler could do, but that “the human sampler is ultimately the best.” Compositionally she races from rapid to languid and back, from normal volume to subliminal, almost ASMR-like whispers.

Another reviewer has called “Woman And Child” the centerpiece of the album, and both its position leading off side two and the unusual spoken word composition support it. Over a background of drone and bells, she tells the story of a woman with her infant child that foregrounds the eroticism in the physicality of mother/child relationship. The narration draws the connection between everyday nature, sensuality and spirituality. As much as I listened to woman-forward music in early 1994—and this was after Under the Pink and Exile in Guyville—I wasn’t ready for this at the time. I thought Chandra’s description of the erotic physicality of nursing was exaggerated and felt unprepared to listen to this intimacy. Thirty years on, having raised two children, I understand how much I didn’t know then.

Chandra turns to Spanish for the unaccompanied “En Mireal Del Penal,” again underscoring the connections between Spanish, Arabic and South Asian music. Unlike her performance of de Falla’s “Nana” on Weaving, here she embraces some of the passing tones and accidentals in the tone row even as she interweaves raga improvisations between verses.

“A Sailor’s Life” is Chandra’s most direct embrace of the British folk tradition. The song, a ballad with eighteenth-century roots, was famously performed by Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention in an eleven-minute-long version. Here the performance is stripped back to just drone and voice, but you can hear echoes of Denny’s restrained vocal ornaments in Chandra’s approach, which again brings echoes of Indic valleys to the traditional ballad. The shorter version here underpins the tragic swing from the roguish “A sailor’s life, it is a merry life” that opens the performance, to the same lyric sung a cappella that closes the song after the sailor’s death by drowning, as well as the girl’s desolation after the sailor’s passing.

The Latin plainchant of “Abbess Hildegard” would seem an unusual inclusion in the album’s narrative arc. But the alternating chant verses and ragas connect the famed twelfth-century nun, polymath and composer to the album’s exploration of feminine strength. At the time of the record there was a resurgence in interest in Hildegard, whose music was suddenly everywhere thanks to releases by the early music ensemble Sequentia (their 1994 Canticles of Ecstasy on the Harmonia Mundi label was a best seller) and a 1994 BBC documentary. “Kafi Noir,” in the same key but not the same tone-row, closes the album with an extended raga meditation that brings all the vocal traditions of the album together. Particularly striking are the subtle organum (parallel fourth and fifth) harmonies that seem almost like harmonic overtones emerging from the richness of her voice.

The Zen Kiss is ultimately both about the power of the female voice and an alchemical experience. The kiss of the title is the passage of breath from the singer that transforms the listener. The sheer power and virtuosity of Chandra’s voice ultimately dissolves boundaries between traditional styles and cultures. And ultimately the interpretive grace and power of her performances make the album a statement of female strength that is still stunning to absorb three decades on.

Chandra wasn’t done with this exploration of her voice and we’ll hear the last album in that arc in a few weeks. Next week, though, we will hear a different perspective on strength, grief and loss from another artist we’ve heard before.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Sheila went out on the promotional circuit for the album, and did a brief interview on the BBC program Pebble Mill along with a performance of “Speaking in Tongues III.” The stunning live work, stripped of vocal effects, underscores the brilliant power of her voice:

Ayub Ogada, En Mana Kuoyo

The Kenyan musician’s sole Real World album is a mesmerizing window onto music both specific to the Luo tradition, and universal.

Album of the Week, September 5, 2026

I’ve been reading some things on social media about “Shoot Your Shot September”: making a radical change in your life to do the thing you always wanted to do and the hell with the risk. I suspect that’s what Ayub Ogada’s early life was like. Born Job Seda in Mombasa, Kenya in 1956, he secured a film role in Robert Redford’s Out of Africa under his birth name when he was twenty-nine years old—after playing in a rock band that incorporated musical influences from his native Luo culture for six years previously. He then decided to head to London and see if he could make his fortune; busked on the London streets and in the Underground, scraping by. That bold decision was rewarded when he was invited to play the 1988 WOMAD festival, and rewarded again when another act canceled, stretching his ten-minute performance slot into a full set. Among the impressed onlookers: Peter Gabriel.

Ogada ended up being invited to one of the recording weeks at Real World. There’s no detailed sessionography from the studio, so it’s hard to tell if he recorded his guest appearances on Peter’s Us as well as his guest spot on Geoffrey Oryema’s second album all in the same week as recording his only album for the label. What is clear is that he got a chance to do all three, playing and singing insinuating melodies that sound like sunshine with the combination of his baritone voice and his nyatiti, a traditional 8-stringed lyre of Luo origin.

“Obiero” opens with the nyatiti and Ogada’s voice, an impossibly sunny melody accompanied by subtle percussion and slightly un-subtle Hammond organ (though the single chord played by future Propellerhead Alex Gifford is more subliminal than anything else). I first heard an earlier version of this song on Gabriel’s Plus from Us compilation, which featured tracks from his various collaborators on the Us album, and the version here on Ogada’s own album is positively baroque in comparison to the sparer original.

“Dala” is instrumented even more sparsely, with only nyatiti and small bells (see the bonus videos for an image of them) accompanying Ogada’s multi-tracked vocals as he sings a homecoming song. The liner notes observe: “Home, not as in your house, but as in spiritual home. One person is alone, two people may dance, three people they open the door, four people begin to walk all the way home. Let’s get together and make it like home.”

Sometimes the nyatiti gives a more complex pattern that is itself percussive, as it does on “Wa Winjigo Ero.” The lyre pattern circles over a stretch of about a fourth with octaves, and Ogada’s melody is strongly rhythmic as the song evokes a careless young man leading his herd homeward: “A young man doesn’t look after the cattle, he walks home before them, so he doesn’t even know if all the cattle are behind him. Luckily for him the cattle have all got bells. People say to him, it’s okay, we hear then now.” The percussion gives us the sound of the bells and the overall song has a slight marching cadence.

“Thum Nyatiti” is another circular pattern on the nyatiti, this time accompanied by David Oladunni on the djembe and with the same simple percussion. Ogada emphasizes the driving, percussive nature of the nyatiti on this track, about which he says “the music of the lyre is the voice of the Luo.” A more complex rhythm—triple triplets—underpins “Kronkronhinko,” a paean to the Ghanaian Queen Mother, Yaa Asaantewa, who led the War of the Golden Stool of the Ashanti people against Great Britain. We also get Ogada’s piercing whistle on this track.

“Chiro” sees Geoffrey Oryema return the favor for Ogada’s appearance on his song “Hard Labour,” adding backing vocals alongside Zak Sikobe’s guitar. The vocals are complex but tell a simple story: “Go far, see the world, but don’t forget where you came from.” Sikobe also appears on “10%,” which he co-wrote, a political song responding to the idea that it’s okay if 10% of the population are suffering. Ogada also plays a flute—either an imbele or a wea—alongside the chorus on the latter song; all in all the mix is insinuatingly catchy.

“Ondiek” feels like a more somber version of “Obiero,” as Ogada sings about the dangers of duplicity: “Beware the hand that seems to feed you! A hyena in human form – watch out, where he walks the earth burns.” After two verses and a chorus, Sikobe adds a skittering guitar line, lending a slight feeling of South African mbaqanga (familiar to Western listeners from Paul Simon’s Graceland).

“Kothbiro” opens with the nyatiti playing a pattern like raindrops, setting up a ballad that calls the children and the cattle back to the house. The harmonies of guitar, lute and voice tell a sadder story, as we wonder if the children will ever return. Gifford plays a subtle piano line over the instrumental verse.

The final song, “En Mana Kuoyo,” feels even more strongly like mbaqanga, with Sikobe’s guitar intertwining with the lute and his own overdubbed bass. This is African music for driving down the street with the top down, an indelible feeling of summer.

Ogada only recorded one album for Real World, but he continued to be active musically, recording an album with his band Union Nowhere in the late 1990s and appearing at the Live 8 concert The Eden Project in 2005. He moved back to Kenya and recorded a few more albums with English musician Trevor Warren before his death in 2019. Next week we’ll return to another Real World musician who was intersecting ancient and modern musical styles.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Real World has done a good job of preserving and sharing its performance history. This performance in particular, from 1991, is great because you can not only watch his fingerwork on the nyatiti, you can also see the source of the bells that are the rhythmic accompaniment for so many of his songs, and they’re probably not where you think they’ll be…

BONUS BONUS: Here’s a second live performance of “Obiero” by Ayub Ogada at Real World Studios from 1995:

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. ↩︎

Sheila Chandra, Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices

Voice, drone and the universality of musical expression.

Album of the Week, August 22, 2026

Sheila Chandra had a career arc: actress on the BBC drama series Grange Hill, lead singer in the band Monsoon, top 20 UK hit with “Ever So Lonely.” Then her label wanted her band to drop its Indian influences. She quit the band, went deep into traditional music until she came out the other side, blending influences from traditional British folk music—or, as she notes, “many of the vocal ornaments that are used in British folk are also used in Indian music… And I became interested in the crossover point between those influences.”

She made records in isolation, having retreated from live performing, until she decided it was time to return, and spent time at Real World Studios during a recording week in 1991. That experience may have helped her decide to take the new record she had just made, with just her voice and a drone—so she could perform the material live, completely by herself—and license it to Real World Records for distribution. The approach led to a trio of albums on Real World that she, and critics, still view as her best work, starting with the release of 1992’s Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices.

“Speaking in Tongues I” plunges us off the deep end from the beginning. The performance features Indian vocal percussion, a style called konnakol, which translates to “reciting the rhythmic syllables.” But where traditional konnakol performance is rhythmic within the context of a larger performance, Chandra’s performance here varies rhythm, meter and vocal register to create entire sound worlds. She’s remarked that she wanted the title to invoke the concept of possession, to reflect the degree to which the performance takes flight, and the ending, with its three repetitions of an incredibly tongue-twisting syllabary, reflects the theme of stepping off the edge into something big and new.

Chandra has said that the “ancestors” here are not blood ancestors, but rather all of humanity—or at least the part that sings. “Dhyana and Donalogue” gives us a taste of this approach, with an 11th century Irish ballad juxtaposed against a meditative vocalization (dhyana means “meditation” or “profound reflection”) inspired by Muslim practice. The performance is so quiet and uncluttered that you can hear Chandra shift her vocal resonance from a lower register into a sharper tone within the same breath.

“Nana/The Dreaming” incorporates the music of another ancestral culture, in this case a traditional Spanish lullaby as adapted by the twentieth century composer Manuel de Falla. Set over a drone, it foregrounds the Islamic influences of medieval Spanish culture, even more so as Chandra combines it with a North Indian style improvisation in the same tone row (raga).

“Ever So Lonely / Eyes / Ocean” embraces the idea of combining multiple works that use the same raga, but in this case it takes the form of a greatest-hits medley. “Ever So Lonely” was the first Asian Fusion hit in the British pop charts, and “Eyes” comes from the same debut album; “Ocean” was a later song written by Chandra’s producer and former Monsoon bandmate Steve Coe for her. The combination works like a single utterance of loneliness, desire and reflection. The first side ends with “The Enchantment,” a traditional British folk song broken up in the same way that an Indian ghat might be expanded and improvised upon in Indian classical music.

“The Call” is intended to evoke the Islamic “call to prayer” tradition, which we heard Baaba Maal perform in a Senegalese interpretation on Passion – Sources. Chandra points out the difference in vocal placement, with more resonance in the facial mask (often called a “nasal” sound) as a key difference in the style, which otherwise leverages the vocal improvisation on a a single raga that we’ve heard in other works here.

“Bhajan” is a performance of ancient texts over a guitar drone, which makes them feel more powerful and a little less intimate. Unlike some of the other works here, the single musical anchor is the drone; each fragment uses a different raga. The intensity of the spiritual reflection provides the unifying factor through all the works.

And speaking of intensity, “Speaking in Tongues II” revisits the konnakol practice of the first track and ramps it up to eleven, applying multiple production techniques (reverb vs. dry, sonic manipulation of the vocal, etc.) to make it sound as though the continuous performance is composed of multiple segments edited together. Chandra says this was a deliberate choice, as she perceived she was being dismissed as a “studio artist” who couldn’t perform live; for this record she created deliberately difficult vocal percussion exercises with the sole purpose of being able to recreate them exactly live to silence the doubters!

“Sacred Stones” opens with an improvisation on the drone, here an open fifth that leaves a wide amount of room for melodic exploration. Textually, Chandra combines Indian prayers, Latin prayers, and alleluias into a single invocation of the sacred. The tune flows into the closing track, “Om Namaha Shiva,” a mantra invoking the god that Chandra names “the destroyer of ignorance.” To my ears the performance invokes both the South Asian musical forms and the British folk melodies that she weaves through the rest of the record. It ends as a meditation on divinity and the nature of destruction… and creation.

Weaving My Ancestors’ Voices cemented Chandra’s reputation as an innovating musical thinker, and her subsequent live performances at WOMAD and elsewhere established her as a confident musician. She would take things even further, as we’ll hear soon. But next week we’ll hear some more traditional South Asian music in a massive collection that was released through Real World a few months after this album.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Chandra’s work translated directly to the stage, and there are a lot of live performances to draw from. Here’s “Ever So Lonely / Eyes / The Ocean” in a 1992 performance at World in the Park:

BONUS BONUS: An interview with Chandra from 1992’s WOMAD Festival in Finland leads into a short performance segment of her “Speaking in Tongues” material:

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):

Geoffrey Oryema, Exile

An album mixing traditional music from Uganda and modern reflections, by turns joyous and sober, from a musician in exile.

Album of the Week, August 1, 2026

Imagine you’re a music student, and your father is a senior government minister who gets assassinated when you are 24 years old. Your family is part of an ethnic minority in Uganda, the Acholi people, who are economically marginalized and systematically targeted by Uganda’s dictatorial leader Idi Amin. It’s a crazy situation and you’re afraid for your life, so you get smuggled out of the country in the trunk of a car. You seek asylum in Paris, taking odd jobs and teaching yourself guitar. And then imagine you get invited to play at Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD Festival. This was the path to fame followed by Geoffrey Oryema, an Ugandan exile who became one of the most well known East African musicians of his generation.

Oryema was a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who played the nanga, an African harp, as well as guitar and many percussion instruments. Most of his early performances were solos, but he had a few memorable collaborations with Gabriel, including appearing with him at WOMAD and performing together with Gabriel and Suzanne Vega on the One World, One Voice compilation.

It’s the nanga you hear first on the album to open “Piny Runa Woko,” as Oryema plays a complex circular pattern that reveals itself to be in common time as his voice enters, singing in Acholi. Sometimes the greatest moments on these Real World recordings are where the musicians just get to be themselves, and this is definitely one of them as Oryema’s voice phrases in and out against the rhythm. He layers additional vocals over the repetitive song bemoaning the arrival of dawn after the first night spent with a new lover; the lowest vocals create a murmuring atmosphere of mystery like a dawn chorus. Some of those vocals are from an unexpected backup singer, ambient pioneer Brian Eno.

Oryema switches to guitar for “Land of Anaka,” and the arrangement as a whole is more Western but not more conventional. This is largely thanks to the hands on the keys; Eno contributes both melodies and textures from the Yamaha and is joined on backing vocals by Peter Gabriel. A high tin whistle by Richard Evans, whom we last heard on Passion, underscores the melancholy of the song, which mourns Oryema’s exile from his homeland: “We had hope/ We had dreams/ Dreams of a clear green land/ In place of the family home/ Dead sand, dead sand.” This song of exile is one of Oryema’s most acclaimed and it’s easy to see why.

“Piri Wango Iya” is another love song, this time played on the lukeme, a northern Ugandan “thumb piano” like the mbira of Zimbabwe. Oryema is mostly on his own here on the lukeme and bass, with a little percussion from engineer David Bottrill, accompanying his voice which seamlessly swings from a high falsetto to a low bass line. “Each time I think of you / My heart jumps into my throat…” It’s a gorgeous miniature of a piece.

“Ye Ye Ye” is a more traditional bluesy rocker, and here the band features David Rhodes on slide guitar, with Gabriel contributing “fake organ” on the synthesizer and David Bottrill adding bass and drums. It has the feel of an in-the-studio improvisation with whoever happened to be around the Real World Big Room at the time, but the lyric is serious, telling the legend of the Ugandan warrior Lagila and his death at the hands of Oyuru after a long time of terrorizing the villages. It’s followed by “Lacan Woto Kumu,” which returns to the sound-world of the nanga as it creates complex patterns under Oryema’s vocals and whistling. It’s a hypnotic end to the first side.

“Makambo” is entirely different, mostly driven by Oryema’s guitar with a heavy reverb applied, backed by Bottrill on bass and Eno on “vocal textures.” The liner notes don’t supply any lyrics, only saying, “This song relates the pain that people go through when left with no other choice but to leave their motherland.” Oryema’s vulnerable whistle seems to carry the pain all on its own.

Oryema returns to the lukeme for “Jok Omako Nyako,” the story of a girl possessed by an evil spirit as she walks home from the neighboring village; she is saved by a passerby who has a more powerful spirit that drives the evil one away. Though sung entirely in Acholi, Oryema’s voice carries the story, dipping into his lower range to convey the battle of the spirits. By contrast, “Solitude” is built around a 6/8 pattern on David Rhodes’ 12-string guitar alongside Oryema’s own, as he sings a song dedicated to his mother, a memorial to his assassinated father. “When we used to go to Anaka / Elephants would dance / We were young / We were young/ Erenayo is no more / No more / Mother don’t weep…”

It’s back to the lukeme for “Lubanga” as Oryema sings about his uncertainty about whether Lubanga, who blessed his tongue to learn new languages, is real or unreal. In pre-Christian Uganda, Lubanga was understood to be a spirit of disease and death, but the arriving Christian missionaries identified it with the creator God, which needless to say creates some ambiguity about the interpretation of the lyrics.

Oryema closes with “Exile,” accompanying himself on guitar and djembe and joined by Rhodes on electric guitar and Bottrill on bass, as he sings a prayer for peace and the end of tribalism: “Drop those guns … And if you really have the desire to fight / Pick up a hoe and fight with the soil.”

Oryema’s debut was embraced as both a new voice in “world music” and a powerful humanitarian, and human, statement in the face of exile. It’s an unusual record in the early Real World catalog, featuring almost no percussion and very minimal added instrumentation and mostly letting Oryema’s deep voice and rhythmic playing drive the sound forward. Oryema made two more records on Real World following the success of Exile and “Land of Anaka”; his 1993 Beat the Border was his biggest hit for the label, followed by 1996’s Night to Night. He moved labels to Sony International, releasing four more albums between 2000 and 2010, including Words, a collaboration with Peter’s daughter Melanie. He died of cancer in Lorient, a commune in Brittany, in 2018.

We’ll explore the Real World catalog a little more next week, with another record that dives deep into musical traditions from other parts of the world.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: When WOMAD came to the United States for the first time in 1994, Oryema joined Peter Gabriel in an interview and performance on the Today show. Here’s Matt Lauer interviewing them, followed by a performance of “The River” from Beat the Border:

BONUS BONUS: Oryema continued to perform “Land of Anaka” throughout his career; here’s a 2005 performance with Peter Gabriel on backing vocals from the Africa Calling festival:

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.” ↩︎

Youssou N’Dour, Set

His second major label album finds the Senegalese superstar making uncompromising mbalax dance music that moves feet globally.

Album of the Week, July 18, 2026

When is a hit not a hit? In the world of the music business, having an album that tops a Billboard chart may not be enough to save you from the axe. Such was the fate of Youssou N’Dour’s contract with Virgin Records following the release of his second album for the label. Set, which sounded a note of support and positivity for the Senegalese Set-Setal movement, hit number one on the world charts but failed to generate a single that matched the performance of The Lion’s “Shakin’ the Tree.” That’s the bad news.

The good news is that in almost every way, Set is a superior album to Youssou’s major label debut. While produced by world music musician Michael Brooks (about whom more later), the musicians on the recording were almost entirely Youssou’s band, the Super Étoile de Dakar. Returning from the first album were Habib Faye on bass and keyboards, Pape Oumar Ngom on guitar, and Assane Thiam on talking drum; the rest of the band included Mbaye Dieye Faye on the sabar, Ibou Cisse on keyboards and guitar, Galass Niang on drums, and Thierno Koite and Issa Cissokho on alto and tenor saxophone. Daniel Lanois produced one track, adding a slightly more commercial note, but otherwise the album plays like music written for the streets of Dakar.

“Set” starts things off with a bang, with the band delivering a guitar-led groove as Youssou sings about the desire for a clean slate, for the youth to be able to hope again. There’s a brief bridge in English: “Give me your hand, give me one chance to know what do you think for the future?” And there’s a tight horn section punctuating the final verses and the play-out. The whole thing is in and out in less than 3:50.

“Alboury” is similarly tightly wound, but with the horns leading the charge this time and with shifts in meter driving the music forward. Youssou retells the story of Alboury Ndiaye, Buurba of the Jolof kingdom who led a rebellion against the French colonial powers in Senegal in the late 19th century before dying in battle against them in 1901. The music pivots from one motif to another with lightning speed, before speeding up to an epic finish.

“Sabar” is a groove driven by guitar and talking drum as Youssou instructs the listener on how to dance the traditional sabar dance, which is accompanied by the sabar drum. It’s a cool little moment, a snack of a song, and you’d like to hear it go longer, but Youssou has other matters on his mind. “Toxiques” is clearly meant to be the single, with Daniel Lanois producing together with the UK DJ crew Coldcut. It’s a pointed political protest song: “Rich countries make toxic waste/Why should they send it to me?/Poor countries know toxic waste/ Why should they accept it?” There’s definitely a groove here, but one sees why the song wouldn’t get a lot of airplay in the European or American markets, unfortunately.

“Sinebar” is a joyous, brisk song warning the listener about the dangers of illicit substances. I don’t know if we can trust the tone of the translation but it seems intended as humorous: “The breeze from the sea/Makes me feel hot rather than cool/I cannot even enjoy/Being with my girlfriend/And I’ve been wearing the same clothes since Sunday/Au secours, SOS.” Again interesting to hear how the musicians play against the meters laid down by the percussionists, veering from a strict 4/4 to an extended meter-blurring introduction in the keyboards to a punchy horn part. Youssou’s wordless chorus in which he sings along with the horns is infectious, and this is one where I tend to sing along regardless of my lack of knowledge of Wolof.

“Medina” is a song of praise to the cradle of Islamic faith, over a gentle keyboard and percussion groove with a killer hook in the alto sax. It’s another short one, just over three minutes, and feels like a lead-in to the faster “Miyoko,” even though the latter song only runs about 20 seconds longer. The difference is in the punchy horn charts. The song is dedicated to the Japanese photographer Miyoko Akiyama, who documented Youssou’s tours of Japan and served as his business representative there. Those are her photos on the album cover and in the liner notes.

“Xale (Our Young People)” puts Youssou’s vocals over the Kreisler String Orchestra, in an arrangement by Habib Faye. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but the strings really dig into their parts, playing gnarly harmonies against the sinuous vocal melody. Youssou’s lyrics urge the young folks of Senegal to take control of their own destinies and start to contribute their own ideas for the improvement of their country.

“Fenene (Another Place)” is a straightforward love song (“If you really love me/Come away with me/To a place/Where we may be at peace”) set to a jubilant arrangement. Opening with a strummed guitar chord, a brisk talking drum pattern and Youssou’s amazing vocals, the body of the song is built up with the horn section and bass locking in together on a tight groove as Youssou sings the verses above. We get to observe one of his distinctive vocal talents in action on this song, as the phrasing for each line of the verse is completely different, seemingly decided in the moment. For me, this is the one arrangement on the album that feels like it gives the right amount of time to the song; nothing feels rushed and you’re left feeling somewhat breathless when the talking drum ends.

“Fakastalu (Watch Your Step)” is the closest to an American pop song on the album, what with the restrained backing synths and what is either an uncredited accordion or a very good accordion sound on the synth, as well as Youssou’s simpler singalong performance on the vocals. Were it not for the talking drum and the Wolof lyrics, we might be in an REM song, which might explain why I put this one on a mix tape back in the day (one whose anniversary is coming up; I sequenced it on July 28, 1992, preceding the song with “Simple Twist of Fate” and following it with “King of Birds”).

“Hey You!” continues the general vibe of “Fakastalu” with similar instrumentation, but in service of a relative rarity: a Youssou break-up song. There’s the anguished sounding bridge: “Hey you! Hey you you! Where is Ami? / She’s no longer my girlfriend / For all I know she has found / Someone else who makes her happy.” If you don’t speak Wolof it comes across mostly as a chill out tune, with only a little extra grit in Youssou’s vocals to surface the emotional subtext.

“One Day (Jaam),” by contrast, wears its emotional message of peace for the whole world, including peace between humans and animals, on its sleeve. The arrangement stacks a series of keyboards, from a slightly tinny sounding acoustic piano setting to a more convincing Hammond B3 soundalike to more 1980s synths, atop Habib Faye’s bass, insistent percussion, and horn blasts on the chorus. Youssou sings the “one day” part of the chorus in English atop a vibrant talking drum part, giving American listeners just enough of a hook to grab hold of and try to sing along with. The song comes to an end with a descending vocal line that ends with a cappella harmonies, showing off a casual virtuosity right to the finish.

As mentioned above, Youssou was dropped by Virgin Records after this album, but that was hardly the end of his career. He signed with Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule Musicworks label (an imprint of Columbia Records) and issued the great Eyes Open in 1992, followed by The Guide (Wommat) in 1994. The latter contained his greatest hit, the duet “7 Seconds” with Neneh Cherry, which hit Number One in the Europe, UK, Italy, France, Iceland, and other charts. In 2004 he released Egypt on Nonesuch Records, an album that honored and incorporated music from Mouride Sufism as a statement of solidarity with his religious background. The album was honored (he won his only Grammy award for it) and controversial: recorded in 1999, its release was delayed due to the September 11, 2001 attacks, and some Islamic listeners criticized the record for its perceived combination of Islamic and pop music. Youssou continued to record and even spent a year as Senegal’s Minister of Tourism. He’s now on his own label and showing no signs of slowing down.

We won’t hear another Youssou record, alas—aside from an unobtainable European vinyl release of The Guide, there haven’t been any subsequent album releases on vinyl. But next week we’ll hear another album that crossed over Islamic traditions and pop music, with startling results.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The CD version of Set featured a bonus track, “Ay Chono La”:

BONUS BONUS: A period music video for what seems to be an older version of “Alboury,” complete with soldiers on a train, an unsmiling Habib Faye, and a dance-off:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: There are a lot of longer versions of “Sabar” out there; this one, from a 1991 Earth Day performance in Tokyo, gives an idea of the dance and of some of the wildness left off the record. It’s a must-watch:

BONUS x4: Youssou is still out there performing. Here’s “Sinebar” from 2024. Youssou’s pipes are still impeccable even if his footwork is a little less fleet:

Various, Passion – Sources

A musical journey around the world with the collaborators and inspirations for the sounds of Peter Gabriel’s groundbreaking soundtrack.

Album of the Week, June 27, 2026

In the late 1980s, there was an upwelling of interest in world music. We had Paul Simon working with South African musicians on Graceland, Sting incorporating Latin sounds on …Nothing Like the Sun, Talking Heads incorporating Brazilian rhythms and sounds on Naked (followed by an even more direct partnership by frontman David Byrne on his first solo album, Rei Momo), and of course Peter Gabriel working with the likes of Youssou N’Dour and others on So and Passion. For some onlookers it started to have the whiff of exploitation; I distinctly remember a 1990 article in one of the college papers I wrote for that called out the musicians above as “carpetbaggers,” stealing world sounds for pop.

But as we’ve seen, for Peter Gabriel at least the connection to world rhythms and sounds went back further—as far back as 1982, at least, where on the strength of his song “Biko” he started the WOMAD festival to bring these artists to the public, and featured musicians like the Ekome Dance Company, L. Shankar, Manu Katché, and of course Youssou and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He also, notably, launched Passion as the first record on his Real World label and gave many of these musicians record deals that allowed them to get their music in front of Western audiences. And he put out a label sampler, of a sort, in the form of Passion – Sources, a compilation album that gave space for both the musicians who had collaborated live in the studio on the making of Passion, and for some of the archival tracks that served as the foundation for the sonic explorations on the soundtrack.

We’ve written extensively about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s “Shamas-Ud-Doha Bader-Ud-Doja,” from his first Real World album Shahen-Shah; it opens this compilation in edited form, running just a touch over five minutes and fading out in the middle reprise of the verse. It leads into “Call to Prayer,” by Baaba Maal. Like Youssou N’Dour, Maal, who appeared on the Passion track “Of These, Hope (Reprise),” is an incredible vocalist from Senegal; unlike N’Dour, he is a griot, deeply steeped in the traditions of the Pulaar people, who were among the earliest African peoples to embrace Islam. Here he performs a traditional call to prayer as improvised over accompaniment from Lakshminarayana (L.) Shankar and a low drone; the work appeared in the movie The Last Temptation of Christ during its depiction of the Last Supper.

Shankar performs the next track, “Sankarabaranam Pancha Nadai Pallavi,” with his group the Epidemics, consisting of Zakir Hussain on tabla, Viku Vinayakram on ghatam, and British composer and musician Caroline Morgan on tanbura. Here, as in most of his 1980s work, Shankar plays the double violin, also known as the LSD (L. Shankar Double Violin), an electric string instrument of his own design that covers a wide chromatic range. The music here is a traditional southern Indian Carnatic raga.

Turkish master of the ney flute Kudsi Erguner performs the track “Ulvi,” a brief solo work in the Mevlevi Sufi tradition. If you suspect, based on the brief excerpt here, that a longer selection of ney music would be both hypnotic and slightly soporific, you would be correct, at least judging from the excellent German CD of his work I found in college. But this track is delightful and mysterious to listen to, and about as understated an expression of Sufi spirituality as Nusrat’s qawwali is extroverted.

Master Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy multitracks the tabla, dufi, doholla, and tambourine on “Fallahi,” alongside the mazhar tambourine played by Joseph Alexander, building a tight polyrhythmic pattern that is both dance-worthy and trance-inducing. This is followed by two excerpts from earlier compilations, a “Sabahiya” or traditional morning nuptial serenade from an anthology, The Folk Music of Egypt, produced by Tiberiu Alexandra and credited to “Banga (Tanta-Suaag),” and a dervishlike “Tejbeit” by unknown Egyptian musicians, taken from an Ocora Records compilation with overdubbed percussion by Hossam Ramzy and tin whistle by Richard Evans. Here you can feel the slightly frantic atmosphere of the bar in which the original was recorded.

“Prelude in Tchahargah,” recorded by Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh on the kementché with tabla accompaniment, is a traditional Persian piece that displays some of the underlying affinities between Persian and Indian music. There’s very much a hybrid of dance and spiritual focus here, particularly in the unaccompanied improvisation that ends the work.

“Wedding Song” is a location recording of unknown Moroccan musicians from the set of the film, with percussion added by Ramzy and Manu Katché, that soundtracks the film’s recreation of the Wedding at Cana. It’s appropriately celebratory and hypnotic, with a repeated ten-bar call and response phrase.

“Magdalene’s House” gives us a listen to a musician whose work did not appear on Passion but did appear on the soundtrack of the movie. Abdul Aziz El-Sayed plays unaccompanied kanoun, a large zither-like instrument that allows the player to sound microtones. Here he plays flourishes and rapid runs in octaves along a modal scale, mostly sticking to a recognizable western mode but here and there throwing in some unusual tones for emphasis. The effect is spellbinding; one regrets the track’s short length, as it seems to end just as he finds a theme that could have made a magnificent Bach fugue.

An all-percussion track from the Guinean drum and dance troupe Fatala, “Yoky,” follows. Led by Yacouba (Bruno) Camara on congas and the gongoma drum (made from saw blades attached to a calabash gourd), the ensemble adds a pair of djembes and more gongoma for a hypnotic polyrhythm. Sadly, the ensemble only seems to have recorded one full album, a self-titled release in 1988.

“Ya Sah” is a trancelike number from Moroccan ensemble Nass El Ghiwane, which uses a Western banjo to produce an unusually disorienting cross-cultural effect — just as you think you’re in a foreign place entirely, suddenly the ring of the banjo places the sound squarely in an Appalachian string band tradition. Another number that doesn’t appear in Passion but does appear in the soundtrack, Gabriel says that its sound, which appears in a brothel scene in the movie, was one of the influences on his and Scorcese’s decision about the sound world of the movie.

Les Musiciens du Nil, who appeared on the Passion album in the track “Wall of Breath,” here play a more traditional Egyptian sound on “Al Nahla Al’Ali,” which features percussion and microtonal melodies in a rondo-like dance form that gradually accelerates into a crescendo then slows to a coda, leading to the slow “Song of Complaint” which is played on the Armenian doudouk by Antranik Askarian and Khatchadour Khatchaturian. Askarian appeared on the original recording on the Ocora Records label that was sampled for the opening track of Passion, “The Feeling Begins.” Without the massive drum hit, the traditional Armenian tune is a meditative reverie that completes the transition to another sound world.

As a “thank you” to the musicians whose work was incorporated into the Passion soundtrack, Passion – Sources can be read as a magnificent gesture. That it also functions as a sort of sampler for the mission of Gabriel’s new Real World label, opening ears to new sounds and new artists, is an intended second mission. As a seventeen-year-old listener newly moving beyond the relatively constrained sound worlds of my upbringing, it was revelatory. We’ll continue to explore the sounds of the world through the lens of Real World in the future. But over the next few weeks we’ll check in on some of Peter’s other collaborators as they make music through the end of the 1980s.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s a live performance, with vocals, from Les Musiciens du Nil which gives you an idea of the traditional instrumentation used.

BONUS BONUS: Here’s a 1983 broadcast of Nass El Ghiwane in concert in Paris, playing for a very enthusiastic dancing crowd.

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Baaba Maal has had a long and fruitful career. Here’s his band from an astonishing 2024 performance that combines traditional and modern instrumentation to bring the crowd into a rhythmic trance:

BONUS x4: Kudsi Erguner has also had a long and vital career. Here’s a performance from 2013 that showcases the hypnotic power of the ney flute:

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.

Peter Gabriel, Passion

A landmark collaboration with a seemingly inexhaustible parade of master musicians creates one of the strongest offerings in Gabriel’s catalog.

Album of the Week, June 6, 2026

Peter Gabriel spent the months following So touring the world; the concert film Live in Athens gives a good idea of what that experience was like. But he was still writing music, and the next thing that came from him was a one-two punch: a soundtrack album to the most controversial film of the late 1980s, and a brand new record label to release it. And Peter being Peter, he released the album in June 1989, almost a full nine months after the theatrical release of the film that inspired it.

The energy that today animates reactionary groups like the Promise Keepers and Christian Nationalist groups was alive and well in the 1980s, in the form of groups like the Moral Majority, TV evangelist fans, and other similar gatherings of extremists. They weren’t happy with Martin Scorsese’s film (though few formed an opinion informed by actually having seen it), which dared to imagine that Jesus might have been human enough to have been tempted by the possibility of family life into abandoning his mission; the idea that Jesus might have in particular entertained sexual thoughts was particularly threatening.1 Some of those who felt so threatened lost the plot badly enough that they firebombed cinemas and made death threats against Scorsese. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

Gabriel seems to have escaped the threats, possibly because his album came out so much later than the movie’s release and the height of the controversy. Though a version of the music appears in the film, he kept working on it, trying to find the right sounds and textures, through March of 1989. And, thanks to his ongoing work with WOMAD and his previous collaborations, he had the right musicians to work with, many of whom would go on to release albums of their own on his new label, Real World Records. The list was long and included Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy; Indian violinist L. Shankar; Senegalese vocalists Baaba Maal and Youssou N’Dour; Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Senegalese drummer Doudou N’Daiye Rose; percussionists and string players Massamba Diop, Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh, and Fatala; Turkish ney flute master Kudsi Erguner; Brazilian percussionist Djalma Corrêa; Americans Jon Hassell, David Sancious, Billy Cobham, Nathan East and Manny Elias; and Peter’s long-term collaborators David Rhodes and David Bottrill.

All that said, the most notable music performance on the first track is a sample. “The Feeling Begins” opens with a traditional Armenian melody played on doudouks by Vatche Housepian and Antranik Askarian, from a collection of traditional Armenian music released on Ocora Records years before. The doudouk melody forms the backbone of the arrangement, but the massive percussion attack from Manny Elias with Hossam Ramzy is also fairly magnificent and provides our first clue that we’re in for a genre-bending ride throughout the album. As the doudouk melody comes to an end, the drums roar in a crescendo, using the same trick that Peter so memorably deployed in “The Rhythm of the Heat.”

One thing I discovered as a teenager listening to this album (I bought it the first summer I ever lived for myself, during a monthlong science Governor’s School experience at Virginia Tech, so I listened to it a lot) was that I was less engaged by the tracks that featured fewer live instruments. “Gethsemane” is one of those tracks, constructed by Gabriel from samples of flute and voices. But it’s appropriately ominous and ghostly, and does the job of foreshadowing that it’s meant to do.

It’s followed by one of the more spectacular sequences on the album. “Of These, Hope” opens with a fanfare of sorts on the arghul, an ancient reed instrument that here contributes a swirl of crowd noise over an insistent talking drum courtesy of Massamba Diop. Peter has said of So that the groove was the thing that made that album so special; “Of These, Hope” is a classical composition with groove. It also has strong textural interest thanks to the arghul, and from the combination of drone, flute whistle, talking drum, guitar and synths. This leads into “Lazarus Raised” without break via an anticipatory shiver of synths as another doudouk sample — this time an uncredited Kurdish player from a UNESCO collection — gives us a mysterious melody signifying the expression of power leading to the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Peter’s flute whistle leads us into “Of These, Hope (Reprise),” which plays like a further elaboration of the melody. It misses the shock and awe of the arghul chorus from the first repetition, but gains a different sort of shock and awe thanks to the presence of Baaba Maal, a Senegalese vocalist whose speciality was the traditional music of the Pulaar-speaking peoples of the Futa Tooro region of Senegal.

“In Doubt” is another synth-forward groove, given depth by the uncanny sound of the kementché, an Iranian bowed string instrument here played by Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh. Peter doesn’t let this groove build for very long before a bigger one takes over , a massive percussion onslaught from Doudou N’Daiye Rose and Fatala signals the arrival of “A Different Drum.” I can almost hear Peter telling Geffen Records, “This is the single.” Between the strong rhythmic intensity, the insistently repetitive melodic theme, the wordless chorus, and above all the presence of the spectacular voice of Youssou N’Dour, this is one of the most accessible and memorable tracks on the album. It has the feeling of one of Peter’s songs-in-progress that never received a proper lyric, but the feeling is there, a stirringly heroic track.

What did get life as an independent single, somewhat surprisingly, is the next track,“Zaar.” A complex track built around a slowed- and pitched-down drum sample, the band, here featuring Hossam Ramzy on percussion, Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh‘s kementché, wordless vocals, and an intense series of interjections from L. Shankar’s violin, constructs a striking mood piece whose free interchange of musical ideas and sounds seems to sum up the whole project. “Zaar” was the track Peter chose to represent this project on his first greatest hits album, which would be released two years later, and it feels like a universe of its own.

“Troubled” is built around a mean groove built out of layered drums and percussion, all played by the great Billy Cobham. After we heard him on Champions and on a whole slew of CTI albums, Cobham joined John McLaughlin’s legendary jazz-world-fusion project Mahavishnu Orchestra, and it’s that polyrhythmic intensity that he brings here over a backing of snarling synths and a wordless vocals chorus loop. “Open” breathes more freely, a duet between Peter on the Prophet and Akai S900 and vocals, and L. Shankar’s violin and vocals. It suspends time and, with the echoes of ragas in Shankar’s improvisation, lends an unexpected emotional resonance to the simple melody Concluding the trio of pieces, “Before Night Falls” is a three-way collaboration between Hossam Ramzy, Shankar, and the great Turkish Sufi ney flute legend Kudsi Erguner, with added depth courtesy of one of engineer David Bottrill’s legendary drones. The plaintive melody and fade-out lend the feeling of a sunset over the gates of a desert city.

We leave groove behind for more traditional composition with “With This Love,” a haunting melody played by Robin Canter on the cor Anglais. The melody is gorgeous but the layers of synths detract somewhat from the emotional power of the work. The theme bookends a trio of pieces dealing with the actual crucifixion of Christ, starting with “Sandstorm,” in which Hossam Ramzy, Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh, Manu Katché and Shankar build an atmospheric groove over a location recording of Moroccan percussion and vocals. The synths add a blurriness to the overall effect, so when the Moroccan musicians cut through it’s startling and intense.

“Stigmata” is a joint improvisation by Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh, Shankar and Gabriel. The instrumental texture is deep and mysterious, but ultimately the tension ebbs away into the fade-out before “Passion.” The redoubtable Shankar, Jon Hassel, and Peter’s Fairlight are the supporting players here for the astonishing vocal improvisations of Youssou N’Dour and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, here signifying the suffering of Christ on the cross. Here there is no ebbing of intensity; Nusrat masterfully builds suspense through his sangam improvisation, as Youssou’s interjections cut through to intensify the emotional impact. A devastatingly pure high melody from choirboy Julian Wilkins2 punctuates the rising emotional tide. At the end, everything cuts away but Youssou’s cries and Djalma Corrêa’s percussion.

The choral reprise of “With This Love” is introduced by the cor Anglais melody, but Gabriel wisely leaves the Wells Cathedral Boys Choir (recorded by Richard Evans) totally unaccompanied as they perform a heartwrenching four-part arrangement of the melody. The acoustic of the performance space can be heard—there’s an audible footfall or noise at one point that sounds a bit as though someone has stepped onto an echoing stone floor in one of the transepts and been hastily waved away—adding to the overall timeless resonance of the moment. It’s one of the most stunningly beautiful musical expressions on an album full of remarkable sounds. It’s also one of the most fraught; originally intended to accompany the scene where a devil in the form of a little girl tells Christ that he doesn’t have to suffer, removes the nails from his body, and leads him off the cross, it was nixed from the final film. Scorsese pointed out that the use of a Christian religious signifier like a boys’ choir would further underscore the blasphemy of the moment and pour fuel on the outrage that was already mounting even before the film was released.

“Wall of Breath” leads us into uncertain territory as Christ is tempted to abandon his destiny, with Kudsi Erguner, Shankar, and the Musicians du Nil building an atmosphere based around a shifting tonality. “The Promise of Shadows” takes us to a dark place with Billy Cobham’s drums and a rising chorus contributing to the feeling that something isn’t right. Despite the title, “Disturbed” seems to lead us into a brighter moment, as Shankar’s violin introduces an intense percussion groove built up from Hossam Ramzy’s tabla, African percussion from Fatala, and looped percussion from Mustafa Abdel Aziz and Said Mohammad Aly. Peter’s Prophet and Fairlight provide a simple melodic line to anchor the groove as the percussion fades out.

“It Is Accomplished” is signaled by a fanfare on the arghul followed by an uncanny shimmer of a vocal yell (uncredited on the album, the original location recording has surfaced which is amazing to listen to on its own. You can hear it in one of my Exfiltration Radio mixes). A triumphant melody built around a simple descending four-note pattern gains depth from Billy Cobham’s drumming, David Rhodes’ guitar, and David Sancious’s Hammond organ as the music celebrates Christ overcoming his last temptation and fulfilling his mission. “Bread and Wine” builds a new melody from the echoes of the old, creating something new in remembrance courtesy of a tin whistle performance by Richard Evans.

I cannot overstate the role this album played in furthering my personal musical development and encouraging me to listen to the world with open ears. And Passion marks a significant moment in Peter’s career, as a culmination of his work with WOMAD during the 1980s and a seamless blending of his explorations of synth textures with collaborative compositions from some of the finest non-Western musicians of the moment. It earned a Grammy Award for Best New Age Album3, and helped to further popularize “world music” as a genre in its own right.

It also helped create a vehicle to fuel the demand; as the first release on Gabriel’s new Real World label, it included advertisements for a series of individual recordings from many of the musicians on the record, plus more of Gabriel’s WOMAD collaborators. Real World is still going strong and has reissued many of those pivotal early recordings, some appearing on vinyl for the first time; we’ll check in on those, among other things, starting next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: This 2021 performance by the Francesco Albano Open Ensemble of the Passion score is impressive. With all the layers in the original recording, it’s hard to imagine someone pulling off one of the songs live; to do the entire thing in a single concert is kind of mind-blowing.

BONUS BONUS: Speaking of live performances, Peter performed “Of These, Hope” live at the 1988 WOMAD Festival in St. Austell, with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Youssou N’Dour. Sadly there’s no video but the audio in this bootleg clip isn’t half bad:

Footnotes

  1. It’s a good thing he didn’t imagine himself dancing. ↩︎
  2. Wilkins is now the conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Youth Chorus. ↩︎
  3. Proof positive that this was something new, as the album bears as much resemblance to “New Age” music as it does to Metal Machine Music. ↩︎

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Party, Live at WOMAD 1985

A recently released archival recording documenting the moment when the great qawwali burst onto the world stage.

Album of the Week, May 2, 2026

A traditional religious singer from Pakistan who performed with a harmonium player, percussionists, and a group of singers that included two students, one of whom was his nephew, would seem an unlikely choice for a superstar. The rise of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, about whom Jeff Buckley once famously remarked “Nusrat, he’s my Elvis,” is the story of a musician who was already acknowledged to be the greatest artist in his field before most Western listeners ever heard of him. And that journey to worldwide fame began with a midnight concert 41 years ago this year, at Peter Gabriel’s 1985 WOMAD festival, on a bill that also featured New Order, the Pogues, Toots and the Maytals, and The Fall.

Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (“Ustad” means “master” or “craftsman” in Urdu, Persian and a host of other languages) was born in 1948 in western Pakistan. His family were practitioners of the art of qawwali, or Sufi devotional music, with their musical heritage going back at least 600 years. Nusrat’s father Fateh Ali Khan wanted Nusrat to follow a more reputable profession like engineering or medicine, but the young musician’s playing on the tabla earned praise from master qawwali artists and convinced his father to let his son follow in his footsteps. At age 16, following the death of his father, Nusrat became the lead singer of his father’s party alongside his uncle Mubarik Ali Khan; in 1971 his uncle died and he rose to leadership of the party at age 23.

A qawwali party is a band optimized for traveling performances. The instrumentation is light—tabla or other percussion instruments and a harmonium—and is primarily there to support the singers. In Nusrat’s party this included Mujarad Mubarik Ali Khan (son of Nusrat’s uncle), Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan (younger brother), two pupils, Kaukab Ali and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan (Nusrat’s nephew) and a five-voice chorus. This group of musicians crowded onto a stage on Mersea Island in Essex for an audience that at first sat politely, but by the end of the first song were on their feet, clapping and chanting along.

“Allah Hoo, Allah Hoo” begins with a several-minutes long instrumental solo with the harmonium and the tabla as the group settles in, then Nusrat intones the initial verse melody in something like a plainchant style, alternating with the other vocalists of the party in higher and higher vocal lines, and finally segueing into the chorus with its repeated exhortations of “Allah Hoo, Allah Hoo” after over six minutes of introductory material. From this point forward the party improvises over several main melodic lines: the “Allah Hoo” melody, the verse melody “Ye zamee’n jab na thi, ye jahaa’n jab na tha,” and a stretch of free improvisation in which each of the singers takes turns ascending and descending octaves, a practice called sargam. This section is particularly notable for the interchanges between Nusrat and his young nephew Rahat (now Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan), who was young enough in this record that his voice had not yet attained his adult range. The overall song is a hymn of praise: “O God, O God… When the earth was not, when this world was not / When the moon and the sun had not been created / When even the secret of Truth was hidden from all / There was nothing here / But still, You alone existed.” The overall performance runs for more than twenty minutes.

Nusrat introduces the next song for the festival audience after the instrumental introduction, saying “This is very famous tune—very famous tune ‘Shahbaaz Qalandar laalmeri pat rakhiyo bal’.” The tune, a hymn to the Sufi mystic “Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalendar” (literally “Prophet of God, Red-Robed, Falcon King, Sufi Saint”) who sought to bring peace between the Hindi and Muslim populations in Pakistan and who was regarded by the Hindi people as as an incarnation of God. He was also known as “Jhulelal,” and both the Shahbaaz and Jhulelal names recur in many of Nusrat’s songs of praise. The song itself features a strong melodic pattern that circles between the fifth and tenth tones of the scale. There are fewer sangam passages in this performance, but an extended instrumental break on harmonium and tabla brings cheers and whistles from the crowd. By the end the singers of the party are singing the chorus in overlapping waves, ultimately stopping only as one of the singers suffers an audible coughing fit.

“Biba Sada Dil Mor De” is the sole non-religious song on the album, a ghazal, or love song, that can be translated as “Darling, give me my heart back” or, in the liner notes to one of Nusrat’s later albums, “If you cannot remain before my eyes please give me back my heart.” For the most part the party repeats the refrain over and over again, but after about six minutes they start a series of vocal improvisations, ranging from high obbligato to highly rhythmic sangam utterances from Nusrat. The record ends in a fade out on the cheers of the crowd.

This performance was legendary but not broadly circulated until 2025, when improvements in digital technology made it possible to adjust the levels in a way that permitted the vocals to be appropriately prominent; on the original tapes the sound of the handclaps of the chorus dominated the sound. The release reopens an old question: would Nusrat have found his way to world prominence without the 1985 WOMAD appearance? We will never know, but this first experience led to many later collaborations with Peter Gabriel and a bigger platform for his solo works. We’ll listen to some of those later, but next week we’ll hear from a different Peter Gabriel collaborator on an album that was itself a breakthrough.

You can listen to this week’s album here, including a bonus performance of Nusrat’s famous “Haq Ali Ali”:

BONUS: The recording, amazing though it is, doesn’t fully convey what this band could do. This crowd video of “Shahbaaz Qalandar” shows it all: the polite listening, then the rhythm starts to grab them, then everyone is on their feet. That’s more or less exactly how it happened to me when I saw Nusrat in the mid-1990s in Washington, DC: