Night Song

In the physical world, that place is Pakistan, but within the spiritual domain, Qawwali is a vigorous expression of Islamic Sufism, particularly the Sufi belief that music and poetry possess a unique power to lift the consciousness of listeners. Qawwali should fill an audience with ecstasy, energy, enlightenment; although most western listeners have little understanding of specific song meanings or the Sufi background, they can still experience an exhilarating uplift when they hear a great singer like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

In fact, Nusrat is generally considered to be the greatest Qawwali singer in our time. Born in 1948 in Lyallpur (now named Faisalbad after decolonisation in 1979), Nusrat was the son of a famous Qawwali vocalist— Ustad Fateh Ali Khan. Trained to be a doctor but studying Qawwali tradition secretly or with his father, Nusrat only accepted the vocation of singer after a dream: Ustad came to him, ten days after his death, and asked his 16-year-old son to sing. Nusrat declined, but after his father had touched his throat, he found the gift had come to him. As the dream continued, his father took him to a holy place, the dargah of Ajámer Sharif in Rajasthan, India.

With that Vision, Nusrat devoted himself to Qawwali, his powerful voice and concentrated expression lifting the music above the vulgarisations that represented Qawwali’s populist face in the Bollywood film industry. But despite a huge back-catalogue of more traditional concert recordings, Nusrat is no purist. His collaborations with Peter Gabriel, Bally Sagoo, Massive Attack and, most recently, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder for the acclaimed Dead Man Walking soundtrack or a proposed duet with Bjork, have pushed Qawwali beyond all previous boundaries.

Even Michael Brook, now a veteran of four world fusions and architect of some of the most striking Qawwali/ambient/funk hybrids, admits to a degree of puzzlement. How can a singer of sacred music, in the deepest sense a traditionalist, maintain his integrity whilst recording in styles which range from Sagoo’s tecuhnicolour Anglo-Asian-American hip-hop to Massive Attack’s urban dub or the folkish balladry of Vedder? “I think we can’t map our idea of the sacred and profane on the way he thinks about it,” Brook speculates. “The way he thinks about it, he’s not exactly spreading the world but he’s spreading the sacred music.”

With this understanding, Brook’s own work with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan revels in a growing spirit of iconoclastic freedom. Night Song may be the most daring of these collaborations but simultaneously, it is the most integrated, accessible and inspirational. The airy, drifting synths of past albums have almost disappeared; replaced by ear fluttering sub-bass, fraying guitar tones, rich Hammond Organ and harmonium. Just like drum ‘n’ bass, trip-hop and hip-hop, these sessions take their pleasure from distressed textures, visceral rhythms and frequency extremes. As well as creating more space in tracks, Brook encouraged Nusrat to sing with less of his usual pell-mell intensity. This has highlighted his extraordinary control of pitching and time: a vocal line that curves around a chord change with exquisite grace or a staccato burst of syllables that will suddenly pull up and stretch across the beat, dragging behind or pushing ahead.

Michael Brook agreed that this rhythmic virtuosity is an underestimated aspect of Nusrat’s singing. “That’s very much part of his choreographing what he does,” says Brook. “Not just the rhythms he sings but the way he toys with or flexes the rhythm. A great deal of his expressivitiy is in that. Some of the stuff he did where there’s this incredibly fast scat singing thing and yet it’s not just an exercise in technique. The passion was there.”

Improvisation is one key; passion is the other. Through working on an extended series of projects with Nusrat, Brook has come to learn that short songs are meaningless to him. Brook records a number of very lengthy takes, then selects the hottest material and painstakingly edits it down. Nusrat’s improvisational gifts are always there, yet they really take flight after twenty or thirty minutes of continuous singing, Heat rises, the throat opens, conscious inhibitors fall and the vocal flow becomes a torrent of tonal, temporal nuances. Again, the comparison with John Coltrane, an improvisor who preferred in his later life to play improvisations lasting more than five hours, is apposite. The content of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s songs may remain mysterious; this spectacular improvisational fluidity, however, matched by the passion in his voice, speak not just across genres of music but across age, religious or philosophical beliefs, nationality and culture.

David Toop, February 1996