The lost recordings of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan are testament to the enduring power of the qawwali singer
A new album, Chain of Light, with previously unheard tracks by the Pakistani musical icon, will be released this September, 34 years after they were first recorded
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When Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a young boy, the story goes that his father — a famed and respected musicologist, instrumentalist and vocalist by the name of Fateh Ali Khan — did not want him to follow in his footsteps.
Though the Punjabi-Pakistani family were part of a lineage of Sufi musicians and singers tracing back over 600 years, like many parents, Khan’s father was concerned about stability and status. He felt that being a qawwali singer, or qawwal, would put his son in low social standing as, even in the mid-20th century, qawwali — a devotional musical performance of Sufi Islamic poetry — was not seen as a particularly respectable pursuit. So, he tried to sway Nusrat away from the party (the word used for qawwali groups), and instead pushed him towards engineering or medicine.
However, Khan is said to have had recurring dreams about performing, and his passion eventually persuaded his father to allow him to pursue music — although sadly Nusrat’s first public performance, in 1964, would end up being at Fateh’s funeral.
It feels surreal now to think of an alternate timeline where one of the greatest vocalists of all time built bridges or cured maladies instead of finding his vocation. It is not for nothing that nearly 30 years after his death, Khan is still known as the Shahenshah-e-Qawwali — the king of kings of qawwali. Even now, there is such excitement at the announcement of a newly unearthed collection of Khan’s work, set to come out on 20 September on Real World Records: Chain of Light.
Khan’s voice is at once otherworldly, while holding the ability to stir something deeply human within. It is nourishing and cathartic, boundlessly vast in its capacity to transport its listener to a new plain or realm. Qawwali is, after all, the music of religious ecstasy. In the 1980s, around a decade after the Sabri Brothers first played qawwali in the west at prestigious venues such as New York’s Carnegie Hall, Khan and his party drove the music to an ever-more global audience. He had fans as far flung as Jeff Buckley, Madonna, Whoopi Goldberg, Mick Jagger and more.
But his music also lives in the hearts of many South Asians across the world, be it through the qawwali — he had spent 14 years helming his family’s party — or his late-career forays into Bollywood, imbuing a supposedly commercial genre with his unique brand of mystical longing. Throughout his career, Khan remained adamant that the Sufi belief of using such art to connect to a higher power was at the core of his work — his voice was a means of heightening people’s consciousness so that they might receive spiritual messages of love and peace.
There have been many posthumous releases and discoveries of Khan’s music over the years, including a lost tape found in 2017 from his 1996 recording sessions in California. But now, when so much time has elapsed since his passing in 1997, Chain of Light’s existence comes as a surprise.
Back in April 1990, Khan was in the Real World Studios in Box, a village in the rolling greenery of Wiltshire. He had been working with Peter Gabriel, who still runs Real World, since his acclaimed 1985 appearance at Gabriel’s Womad festival. Reportedly, after initially finding it too cold to sing outdoors in British summer weather, festival staff convened to get him blankets and electric heaters, and Khan ended up playing for the whole night.
At the time he was working with Canadian experimentalist Michael Brook on the celebrated fusion project, Mustt Mustt. But it transpired that he and his party had been performing and recording other songs around that period in the studio — but the recordings were later lost. It was only in 2021 when Real World were relocating their archive that they found the 1990 tape, labelled simply “trad album”. In listening to the tape they realised these were previously unheard recordings of Khan, including one song for which there is no other known recording — a dense and ruminative version of Ya Gaus Ya Meeran.
All four of the tracks on Chain of Light are untouched by studio wizardry, and are instead just unfettered and arresting testaments to the power of Khan and his party. The undulating tabla, dholak and skittering handclaps of the hypnotic opening track, Ya Allah Ya Rehman are particularly engrossing, as he and his chorus call to and praise the divine in Urdu. There’s the slower pace of Aaj Sik Mitran Di, with its aching Punjabi lyrics with a burning desire for beauty.
The vocal harmonies and bellowing harmonium of Khabram Raseed Imshab hold you in their warmth, as they sing 13th century Indo-Persian Sufi poet Amir Khusro’s lines, which translate to devastatingly yearning turns of phrase such as: “All the gazelles of the desert have put their heads on their hands/In the hope that one day you will come to hunt them.” Through it all, Khan’s voice feels monumental and transcendental, interspersed with his elastic sargam vocal acrobatics before building into an unbridled crescendo atop the ebb and flow of percussion.
There is something special about these recordings still connecting to that celestial, zealous feeling all these years later. Clearly, regardless of his eschewing engineering and medicine, Khan’s music and its legacy has been instrumental in forging ties between places and imbuing something restorative to those who hear it. Chain of Light is a reminder of Khan’s exuberant and compelling spiritual force, and his endless devotion to awakening that sublime, beautiful power.
Chain of Light is out on 20 September on Real World Records.
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