Singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was born on October 13, 1948, in Lyallpur, Pakistan. He learned qawwali, a type of Muslim devotional music, from his father. In 1966, he sang qawwali for the first time publically and by the ‘70s had established himself as the best of his generation. He went on to tour internationally, contribute to soundtracks. He died on August 16, 1997, in London, England.
The late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was the king of qatvivals. Pakistani Sufi singers who embrace music as a form of devo-tion, a way of achieving transcendence and drawing nearer to the divine. Qat/mall, which means “wise or philosophical utterance,” is a vocal expression of Sufism, the mystical sect of Islam. In Pakistan and in countries with large Pakistani communities, Nusrat was a superstar. His fans danced, whirled, shouted, and hurled crumpled, large-denomination bank notes at him as a sign of appreciation and respect. His concerts featured traditional devotional music, and he swept the audiences into a frenzy. His music has a rapturous, oth-erworldly quality that transcends language and enters the heart as pure feeling. Nusrat’s music was first championed in the West by Peter Gabriel, who recorded him as part of a live World of Music Arts and Dance (WOMAD) festival in 1983. I remember lis-tening to the five-minute excerpt of Nusrat’s WOMAD perfor-mance on the 1984 double LP Music and Rhythm. It was unlike anything I had ever heard. His singing communicated tremendous emotion with a breathtaking urgency and virtuos-ity. Four years passed before his first solo recording was
66 fly) Rhythm Planet
Nusrat Fateh All Kahn
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