Punjab's qawwal made Sufi trance a world stage
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, born 13 October 1948 in Lyallpur, led his family's qawwali party from 1971 and threaded sargam, khayal, and fierce rhythm into Sufi devotion. Birmingham's Oriental Star Agencies helped export the sound. Death on 16 August 1997 froze a voice ranked among the century's greats.
His family, originally from Jalandhar, had passed qawwali down for almost 600 years, yet his father Fateh Ali Khan, a musicologist and qawwal, wanted his first son to become a doctor or engineer because singers held low social status. Nusrat played tabla in the family party, and praise from visiting vocalist Munawar Ali Khan for his drumming helped end the pressure. After his father died in 1964 he fronted the group with his uncle Mubarak Ali Khan, taking sole leadership after Mubarak's death in 1971.
A 1965 Radio Pakistan festival broadcast won admiration from masters such as Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. He sang mostly in Urdu and Punjabi, occasionally in Persian, Braj Bhasha and Hindi, and could hold peak intensity for hours. Birmingham's Oriental Star Agencies signed him in the early 1980s, releasing hits like Mere Rashke Qamar and Sochta Hoon, and in 1989 he sang Sikh hymns at a gurdwara in Slough, keeping up a tradition of Muslim performers there.
International doors opened at London's WOMAD festival in 1985, in Paris, in Japan in 1987 and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1989. Work with Peter Gabriel on the score for The Last Temptation of Christ led to Real World Records and the fusion album Mustt Mustt in 1990; he later recorded with Eddie Vedder for Dead Man Walking and spent 1992–93 as a visiting artist at the University of Washington. He toured over 40 countries and wrote for Bollywood late in life.
Ill with liver and kidney trouble, he died of cardiac arrest in a London hospital on 16 August 1997, aged 48, days after his duet with A. R. Rahman was released. Nephew Rahat Fateh Ali Khan carries on the line.
Source: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
