Ye jo halka halka suroor hai

There are great singers, and then there are those few voices that transcend time. The late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan could not only transcend time, but also language and religion. There was magic when he opened his mouth, a sense of holy ecstasy that was exciting and emotional. It wasn’t  uncommon even for Western listeners, who didn’t understand a word he was singing or follow his Sufi traditions, to be moved to tears upon hearing him.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Punjabi: نصرت فتح علی خان (Shahmukhi)) (October 13, 1948 – August 16, 1997) a world-renowned Pakistani musician, was primarily a singer of Qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis (a mystical tradition within Islam). Considered one of the greatest singers ever recorded, he possessed a six-octave vocal range and could perform at a high level of intensity for several hours.  Extending the 600-year old Qawwali tradition of his family, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is widely credited with introducing Sufi music to international audiences. He was popularly known as Shahenshah-e-Qawwali, meaning The King of Kings of Qawwali.

In his improvisations, his voice would soar skyward to heaven, carrying his audience with him. While the core of his work and his life was the Sufi texts, the mystic holy poetry of the spirit, Ali Khan didn’t limit himself to that in his career. He was happy to sing the love poems known as ghazals, to perform vocal exercises, and even lend his talents to Bollywood and Hollywood, to range into ambient and dance music. But none of it was at the expense of his soul.

Even before he became popular on account of Hindi film songs, there were groups of music enthusiasts for whom Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a cult figure. The ease with which he fused a Western beat with Eastern tradition won him many fans much before his plagiarised versions hit the Indian market.

Nusrat once told an interviewer: "Our young generation which was brought up abroad is totally ignorant of our culture. They listen to Western music, adopt Western fashions. With my awaaz (voice) I wanted to appeal to them - in our own language in their form..."

Nusrat’s concerts were a celebration of life, and the atmosphere always bordered on the ecstatic. The weighty Khan sat cross-legged with his harmonium beside him and his musical accompanists and chorus singers around him. Each song began with a slow, quiet introductory alaap; from there, a rhythmic pulse began on the tabla. Nusrat gradually wove a web of devotional lyrics and vocal acrobatics, bringing the music to a fever pitch of ecstatically repeated phrases, each slightly different from the others, and then lowered the intensity before taking it to an even higher peak. Almost every note, every beat was emphasised by a hand movement.
Nusrat once told an interviewer that he had decided to become a qawwal after a dream in which he saw himself singing at the shrine of Muinuddin Chisthi in Ajmer. Initially, he said, he dismissed the dream as absurd: no qawwal had ever been allowed to sing inside the Muslim shrine. But when the dream kept recurring, he felt that the sign was too important to ignore. And sure enough, in 1979, he became the first qawwal to be invited to sing at the Ajmer shrine.