Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
1948 – 1997 · Pakistan
Known for: Pakistani qawwali singer who carried Sufi devotional music to the world
“A voice that turned devotion into sound and carried it across the world.”
Biography
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was born on 13 October 1948 in Lyallpur, now Faisalabad, in Pakistani Punjab, the fifth child and first son of the singer and musicologist Fateh Ali Khan. His family had practised qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis, for close to six hundred years, and yet his father hoped for another life for him, medicine or engineering, because qawwals commanded little social standing. The boy's gift settled the argument. He entered his father's party as a tabla player while learning to sing, appeared in public for the first time at fifteen, at the ceremony held forty days after his father's death in 1964, and took his place as lead singer the following year beside his uncle Mubarak Ali Khan. After his uncle died in 1971, the party became his own.
What he did with that inheritance was to widen it without breaking it. Into a devotional form built on repetition he wove sargam improvisation, the phrasing of khayal and a driving sense of rhythm, and he could hold a performance at full intensity for hours together. Ni Main Jana Jogi De Naal, which he composed to verses by the Sufi poet Bulleh Shah and first performed in 1971, and Haq Ali Ali made his name in Pakistan. Signed in the early 1980s by Oriental Star Agencies in Birmingham, he carried qawwali to listeners who had never heard it: the WOMAD festival in London in 1985, Paris concerts recorded by Radio France, Japan in 1987, the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1989. In 1988 he sang on Peter Gabriel's music for The Last Temptation of Christ, and a year later he joined Real World Records, where the album Mustt Mustt set his voice beside the guitar and loops of Michael Brook. He sang chiefly in Urdu and Punjabi, and performed in more than forty countries.
His last years were crowded with work and shadowed by illness. He went on recording and touring as his health failed, and in August 1997, travelling from Pakistan towards Los Angeles for a kidney transplant, he was taken gravely ill and died in London on 16 August, aged forty eight. He was buried in Faisalabad. His influence ran on in three directions: in qawwali itself, carried forward by his nephew Rahat Fateh Ali Khan; in the popular music of Pakistan, India and the Hindi film industry, which absorbed his phrasing entirely; and among listeners abroad who follow a music in a language they do not speak. The New York Times called him the greatest qawwali singer of his generation.