Lost and sound: Bhanuj Kappal writes on the new Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan album

In October 2022, Pakistani photojournalist Saiyna Bashir was interviewing Canadian musician Michael Brook for an upcoming documentary on Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Brook and Nusrat had worked extensively together; he had a lot of stories to share.

At some point, largely out of politeness, she asked: “What are you working on at the moment?” She wasn’t prepared for the bombshell that fell in her lap.

“In the middle of the interview, he checks his email and says, ‘They’ve given me the green light so I can tell you. There’s a new Nusrat album coming out, and I’m producing it’,” Bashir recalls. “I just couldn’t believe it.”
The documentary, Ustad, is due out next year. The album, Chain of Light, was released last week.
How did this happen? How did a set of four unknown songs, left behind by a legend emerge from the archive of a London record label?
Well, in 1990, Nusrat and his party (the English term for a qawwali group) recorded four tracks at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records studio in England. The tape from that session disappeared into the label’s warehouse archive, and lay there, forgotten.
No one thought of it even in 1997, when the legendary qawwal died, at just 48.
It was only in 2021, when the archive was being moved to a new location, that the music was rediscovered. “It had not been heard since the day of the recording,” says label manager Amanda Jones.
The analog magnetic tape had to be digitised before it was sent on to Brook (who was in the studio for the original session) and Gabriel.
“They were delighted at this discovery of ‘buried treasure’, both the outstanding performance and the pristine sound,” Jones says.
And so it is that now, 27 years after his death, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice soars again.
A legend is born
Nusrat would have been a doctor, if his father had had his way. He was the fifth child and first son born to the noted Pakistani qawwali singer and musicologist Fateh Ali Khan.
Though the family claimed descent from an unbroken line of qawwals going back 600 years, Fateh did not want his son to follow in his footsteps. He pushed him towards a career in medicine, going so far as to exclude him from the circle of students and musician friends that passed through their home.
But the boy seemed to know he wasn’t meant for a lab or stethoscope. He watched in secret as his father taught his students. He played the harmonica and sang when he was out of earshot.
His father eventually relented and agreed to train him, but was diagnosed with throat cancer not long after, and died when Nusrat was 15. The boy’s first public appearance would be at his father’s chehlum, the ceremony held to mark the end of the 40-day mourning period.
In the book Nusrat: The Voice of Faith, author and music scholar Pierre Alain-Baud notes that there were some concerns about the boy becoming the head of the family group at this point. He was intensely shy, partly because of his obesity, and was still only in the early stages of his own training.
But a number of mystical signs and dreams — including one in which the family’s patron Sufi saint, Khawaja Muhammad Dewan, appeared to his uncle and declared that Nusrat “would sing and be known the world over” — ensured his succession.
Under the guidance of that uncle, Mubarak Ali Khan, the teenager spent years in rigorous practice, honing his occasionally shrill voice into an instrument of raw power and fleet-footed flexibility.
Through the ’70s, Nusrat and his party rose rapidly to subcontinental stardom, earning praise from legends such as the Hindustani vocalist Roshan Ara Begum, poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz and filmmaker Raj Kapoor.
By the 1980s, Nusrat was performing regularly in the UK, where he had become a hit with the South Asian diaspora. Muhammad Ayub, founder of the music label Oriental Star Agencies, was releasing records of his music there too. It was Ayub who introduced the qawwal to former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel, in 1985.
Gabriel invited Nusrat to perform at that year’s edition of the music festival WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance), which he had launched three years earlier.
Nusrat and his party took the stage just before midnight and performed until 4 am, “leaving behind him an exhausted, haggard audience,” Alain-Baud writes.
“He opens with just one note of his voice, charging straight in, and you can hear the crowd go silent [on the recording],” The Guardian’s global music critic, Ammar Kalia, wrote in his account of the concert. “It was the first time that a lot of these British festival goers would have heard this kind of music live, and he just blew them away.”
Note quite done yet
The concert was a turning point in Nusrat’s career. In 1989, he became one of the first artists signed to Gabriel’s new label, Real World, which released his traditional qawwali album Shahen Shah in 1989 and the iconic qawwali-fusion record Mustt Mustt (a collaboration with Brook) in 1990.
Massive Attack’s remix of the title track became a club hit, helping propel him, and qawwali, into a global spotlight.
Soon, Nusrat’s distinctive voice was soaring in the background on soundtracks for films such as Natural Born Killers (1994; directed by Oliver Stone) and Dead Man Walking (1995; directed by Tim Robbins).
His music was being remixed by Asian stars such as Bally Sagoo and Talvin Singh. It was being cited as inspiration by Carlos Santana, Eddie Vedder and Jeff Beck.
Closer to home, his collaboration with Javed Akhtar on songs such as Koi Jane Koi Na Jane and Afreen Afreen made him a household name in India.
He earned multiple honours around the world, including two Grammy nominations, and toured relentlessly.
His death, following a massive heart attack, was sudden and tragic but not really a surprise. He had been ill for years. There were accusations that he had been worked to death. Those who worked with him say he wouldn’t let up; he wanted to always be working, touring and singing too.
Decades on, it feels a little like he slipped through the cracks.
Born in a time just before the internet, his music is much-loved but there is little left of his story. The couple of books on him are out of print; the TV documentaries from the ’90s are obscure and little-known.
This inspired Bashir and her co-producer, Zakir Thaver, to spend years combing through footage and travelling the globe to meet the people who knew and worked with the Ustad.
That film is still about a year away, but until then, there are the four new songs. Click here to listen to his otherworldly voice swirl in jagged melismas over the tabla-and-harmonium grooves of Ya Allah Ya Rahman, and fill with raw spiritual yearning on Aj Sik Mitran Di. Listen to the nimble acrobatics over the constantly shifting rhythms of Ya Gaus Ya Meeran, as the song builds to its crescendo.
It is a precious final gift from one of the subcontinent’s most gifted maestros.