NUSRAT FATEH ALI KHAN

Born: Lyllapur (now Faisalabad), Pakistan, 13 October 1948; died London, England, 16 August 1997

Genre: World

Best-selling album since 1990: Mustt Mustt (1991)

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, son of the revered qawwali (a professional singer of mystical Sufi poetry) Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, took over his father's Party (male-only ensemble) in 1971, and by the end of his life he had popularized a specifically spiritual genre as a music of ecstatic release among non-Sufi Westerners, even adapting the style's ancient tenets to pop-oriented song forms and arrangements.

Qawwali is a modal music performed by one or two improvising vocalists over and in alternation with a vocal chorus, supported by vigorous percussion, handclapping, and a harmonium (portable pump-organ) that underscores the melody. Sung in Farsi, Hindi, and Urdu, the lyrics of qawwali draw on both Islamic and Hindu poetic traditions, usually repeating a few lines that employ subjects such as romantic love and alcoholic intoxication as metaphors for the adoration of God and inner enlightenment. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, an overweight, heavily sweating performer with a beaklike nose, was not conventionally charismatic but sang with enormous drive and passion in a slightly hoarse voice that was capable of elaborate, seemingly inspired phrases. The late singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley likened Khan's voice to "a velvet fire," and his utterances do indeed seem to rise and singe the air like flame.

Khan first performed to a predominantly Western audience in 1985, at Peter Gabriel's WOMAD (World of Music, Arts, and Dance) festival at Mersea Island, Essex, England. Besides introducing qawwali to young white audiences in Great Britain and the United States, he deemphasized the music's devotional content (but not its inherent energy) to establish it as a soundtrack staple in the Bollywood Indian and Pakistani film industries and as a feature of soundtracks for some American-made movies, including Dead Man Walking (1995), in which he duetted in qawwali style with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam; Passion, the Peter Gabriel-produced soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ (1988); and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1995).

Ustad Fateh Ali Khan discouraged his son's interest in qawwali despite their family's six-century heritage of musicianship, urging him to study medicine, but as a child Khan eavesdropped on music lessons his father gave to gain an understanding of the fundamentals of the genre. Shortly after his father's death in 1964, Khan sang for the first time in public and then commenced serious study of the qawwali form with his uncle Ustad Salamat Ali Khan. He joined his uncle Ustad Marbarik Ali Khan's qawwali party. He gained personal recognition and popularity upon speeding up the tempo of the music, and when Ustad Marbarik fell ill in 1971, Khan claimed leadership of his group. In 1979 he realized his recurring vision to become the first qawwali to sing at the Muslim shrine Hazrat Khwaja Moinud-Din Chisti in Ajmer, India, where neither qawwalis nor Pakistanis had previously been welcome.

First recording in 1973, Khan became prolific, recording more than fifty albums for Pakistani, British, American, European, and Japanese labels by 1993. Don Heckman, a music journalist for the Los Angeles Times, has proposed that Khan's "Western reputation was built through live performance." Nonetheless, Khan actively courted a crossover audience by recording the album Musst Musst (1991) with the experimental composer Michael Brook. Khan and Brook cut typically expansive qawwali performances to pop-song length, employed vocal exercises rather than words as the basis of the vocals, and underscored everything with Western rhythms. Massive Attack's remix of the title track was a surprise club hit throughout the United Kingdom.

Khan died of natural causes accelerated by general ill health and exhaustion brought on by continuous world touring. Lacking a male heir, he passed his musical legacy on to a nephew, Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Posthumously, his own voice continues to burn in remix collections, especially by Asian-British musicians such as those in the Asian Dub Foundation.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Rough Guide to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (World Music Network, 2002); The Final Studio Recordings (American Recording Company, 2001); Bandit Queen (Milan, 2000); The Supreme Collection Vol. 1 (Caroline, 1997); Greatest Hits Vol. 2 (Shanchie Records, 1998); Greatest Hits Vol. 1 (Shanachie, 1997); Mustt Mustt (Real-World/CEMA 1991); The Day, the Night, the Dawn, the Dusk (Shanchie, 1991). With Peter Gabriel: Passion (Universal Music, 2002). With Eddie Vedder: Dead Man Walking Soundtrack (Columbia, 1996); Natural Born Killers Soundtrack (Interscope, 1994); Asian Dub Foundation remix: Community Music (London, 2001).

howard mandel