Nusrat Fateh Ali’s voice stunned the world: NY Times
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“Chain of Light,” an album of four qawwalis the Pakistani singer recorded in 1990, are arriving after being discovered in the vaults of Peter Gabriel’s label.
Bashir and Thaver were producing an upcoming documentary called “Ustad” about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — the celebrated Pakistani singer who died in 1997 at age 48 — and Brook, the silver-haired musician whose ambient work has crossed paths with Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno and Michael Mann, had just revealed that he was working on an unreleased Khan song.
It was part of “Chain of Light,” an album Brook recorded with Khan at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in England more than three decades ago. “Ya Gaus Ya Meeran,” the track in question, was an unreleased Khan qawwali, a song based on the devotional poetry of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam.
Khan, a polyglot whose musical family initially dissuaded him from singing in favor of another career, first appeared onstage as a teenager after the death of his father in 1964.Over the next two decades, his music became a balm and source of national pride for Pakistan.
He began recording with Gabriel in 1988, and soon appeared on Trent Reznor’s “Natural Born Killers” soundtrack and with Eddie Vedder on the “Dead Man Walking” soundtrack. “Chain of Light” with four traditional qawwalis written in Urdu, Punjabi and Persian that were recorded in April 1990 — will be released by Real World Records on Friday. (Khan’s daughter, Nida, along with Usha Rajan, the custodian of his estate and a family friend, have both been involved with this project.)
Gabriel, who first encountered Khan when he saw him performing at the WOMAD festival, which he helped found, in 1985, recalled the moment specifically: “It was dusk and you could feel the whole arena becoming charged with the qawwali and that extraordinary, spellbinding voice,” he wrote in an email.
Later working with Khan, “I was astonished at his ability to improvise wonderful melodies with all their emotional peaks and troughs,” he added. “He was not just a maestro of the voice but a master composer who could create these classic lines on the fly whilst maintaining a great sense of the whole composition, as it emerged out of the ether for the very first time.”
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