Ten years ago today, I was wrapping up production on the then-annual South Asian music festival on WKCR, Columbia University’s radio station. As exhilarating as putting together and presenting those marathon WKCR broadcasts always were, I was also utterly spent that year, especially since we had done an extra-long festival in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of India and Pakistan’s independence.
By then, the word had already spread that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was very ill. Still, it was a shock when in the very final hours of the South Asian marathon broadcast, a friend called me to say that Khansahib had just passed away in a London hospital.
WKCR has long been famous for doing marathons to commemorate joyous and mournful occasions alike. (At noon today, the station began a weeklong tribute to jazz legend Max Roach, who sadly passed away in his sleep last night.) Within minutes of receiving the news, WKCR’s student board of directors had agreed that we would suspend regular programming once again in order to dedicate the next 24 hours to Nusrat’s music.
Fans and friends of this great musician soon heard about our efforts, and we were contacted by people from all over North America, Europe, and South Asia about the memorial broadcast. (Incidentally, that broadcast also led to some of the most surreal work engagements I’ve ever had, including a guest appearance at that year’s Pakistan Independence Day Parade in NYC, but that’s a story for some other day.)
In retrospect, it’s pretty easy to discern what made qawwali as a form so fascinating to a so-called “mainstream” audience; that is, an audience outside South Asia and the South Asian diaspora communities. (Of course, a listener like me who really only knows the poetry in translation—and is neither Sufi nor Muslim, for that matter—obviously experiences Nusrat's music in a different and perhaps more shallow way than someone who has been steeped in and has inherited that culture.)
Firstly, there is the sheer ecstasy of the sound. Accompanied by pounding drums and handclaps that evoke a heartbeat, and with choral refrains that draw audiences deep in and far up, qawwali has an energy that is not unlike American gospel. But Nusrat at his very best offered something even greater: a vocal agility that totally belied his awkward, massive size, a mastery of rhythm and sargam that made his improvisations events, and an emotional intensity that recalled something of maybe James Brown crossed with Umm Kalthoum (for lack of better comparison).
In addition, Nusrat was an evangelist of the highest order. If someone approached him with a tape recorder (“Just sing a little for my wife/child/brother, please!”) he would happily do so—not because he was naïve enough to believe that such material might not eventually find its way into a pirate recording or an unauthorized remix or some such (because it very often did), but because he fervently believed that the music’s Sufi message of love and peace could, and should, find its way to as many people as possible, through whatever channels were on offer.
That same impulse led the singer, for better or worse, into all kinds of collaborations and “crossover” projects ranging from the excellent to the blindingly bad. Some of them, such as the series of recordings Nusrat made for friend and colleague Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, undoubtedly created and shaped a large portion of his European and American following. Others, whether made for a “domestic” (Pakistani and Indian) audience or a foreign one, are better left unmentioned.
Nevertheless, the impact Nusrat had internationally, especially in the last fifteen or so years of his life, is incalculable. His influence wasn’t just the result of his voice or musical talent, immense as they were—for many, he was the voice and face of Sufism, teaching the world a vision of Islam and of humanity’s relationship to the divine—the tawassuf of direct personal experience of God, truth, and love—that was light years away from the philosophies and politics of the mullahs, “talibs,” Wahhabis, and Salafis who sought to define Islam in a microscopically narrow way.
While in Delhi a couple of years ago, I visited the shrine of the Sufi saint Sheikh Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia Chishti; the site also houses the tomb of the poet Amir Khusrau (whose work I believe I first heard on a Khansahib recording, though I can’t be sure now). On my way into the shrine, accompanied by the smells of both thousands of roses and blood from nearby halal butcher stalls intermingling in the air, I walked past stall after stall of vendors selling countless cassettes and cds of Nusrat’s music as well as that of many other qawwals past and present. Nusrat’s recordings still reigned supreme in number.
In the years since his death, so very much has changed in the world. I wonder what Nusrat would have made of all of it, and what, if he were alive and healthy, he would and could have been able to do to be a counterforce, to sing truth to power—to power of all ideological stripes.
(For a recommended discography, please follow the first NFAK link above to an article I wrote for National Geographic online. Artwork: the cover of NFAK's 1988 Real World album Shahen Shah.)
