Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan makes the purist pop of all

by Jon Garelick

Afro-pop enthusiasts boogie to Salif Keita, Kanda Bongo Man, Youssou N’Dour, and Angélique Kidjo. Proud Celts have Clannad, Altan, and the Chieftains. Brazilian pop fanatics worship Milton Nascimento. But in Alternative Nation, the world-music man of the moment is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The one-sheet from his publicist is an alterna-rock wet dream. Peter Gabriel, Trent Reznor, and Eddie Vedder have all worked with him. Joan Osborne wants to study with him. Jeff Buckley has interviewed him for Interview, and techno brats are vying for the remix rights. And the Nusrat bonanza continues, with several new albums and an appearance this Sunday, April 28, on VH-1 (9 p.m.) as part of the VH-1 Honorstribute to the Witness human-rights organization.

In case you haven’t heard, Nusrat is a rotund 48-year-old Pakistani master of the Sufi-Muslim devotional music known as qawwali. In its more traditional forms, qawwali entails performance by a lead singer and — in Nusrat’s case — an eight- or nine-member vocal “party,” including a harmonium player and one or two percussionists, especially, but not exclusively, a tabla player. The forms are essentially north Indian: simple melodic themes and harmonic vamps that, raga-like, are subject to infinite melodic and rhythmic variations.

Drawing from a vast repertoire of centuries-old mystical poetry, Nusrat mixes and matches portions of text as the spirit moves him and his audience, spurs call-and-response lines with his party, cues tempo changes. He trades complex rhythmic figures with the tablas and unleashes his husky tenor in elaborate Coltrane-like melodic inventions. Nusrat’s voice is occasionally countered by higher-register vocal wails from his younger brother, the harmonium player Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan. Throughout a piece, unison handclaps from the party create a steady, often frenetic, pulse — deeply funky, with the accent, as they say, “on the one.”

It’s a heavily improvised music that, performed live, is intended to inspire devotional ecstasy in its audience. The lead singer can gauge the crowd, drawing on the appropriate text for the mood, gearing the rhythms up or chilling them down. In Nusrat’s last Boston appearance he reportedly threw all of Symphony Hall (with many Pakistanis in attendance) into an unprecedented frenzy. For the lay listener tuning into Nusrat on disc, the rhythmic vitality is enough to inspire spontaneous dancing around your living room, or set your teeth on edge. On albums, at least, a single piece may last as long as half an hour.

The current Nusrat craze began with the sponsorship of Peter Gabriel; he employed Nusrat’s vocals on his Passion soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ, and his Real World label (distributed in the US by Caroline) has released at least five recordings by the singer. In 1991, Nusrat released his first “crossover” album, Musst Musst, on which he collaborated with the ambient composer and guitarist Michael Brook. (That album included a remix of the title cut by British trip-hop group Massive Attack.) In 1994, Trent Reznor mixed Nusrat (with Gabriel and with his Party) into the soundtrack for Natural Born Killers. Now Columbia has released two versions of the Dead Man Walking soundtrack, both featuring Nusrat in “duet” with Eddie Vedder.

How you take your Nusrat these days is a purely subjective matter. His modal-based melodies are infinitely adaptable to Western blues and songform, and when, on Dead Man Walking: The Score, he and Farrukh collaborate with the likes of Vedder and an experienced world-music traveler like Ry Cooder, the result is a convincing hybrid — an exotic music that transcends place yet sustains its own integrity. (It’s charming to hear Vedder, who is, after all, Alt Nation’s own tortured mystic, follow Nusrat’s Urdu verse with his American drawl.) Whereas Music Inspired by the Motion Picture Dead Man Walking was the usual soundtrack list of pop-rock heavy-hitters (Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Lyle Lovett, etc., with cameos by Nusrat), The Score is a world-music concept piece. Nusrat is most prevalent, but there’s also a lot of Cooder, a gospel group, some traditional Armenian music. The general mood is of redemption through suffering.

The new Night Song (Real World) is Nusrat and Brook’s follow-up to Musst Musst, another attempt to harness Nusrat’s already hooky melodies to shorter forms and vary their textures with airy synths, electric bass, Hammond organ, deeper rhythm-track backbeats, and occasional Mitchell Froom-like studio noises. It’s still an overall organic, acoustic effect, and the title alone tells you that this music is devotional lullaby, prayer as love song. Whereas Nusrat’s more traditional recordings are ecstatic, this one is meditative.

The level of musicianship is high on all these albums, but Nusrat’s own traditional recordings are the funkiest. The beat is unrelenting. You can hear it on any of his Real World recordings with his Party, on his one Shanachie release, The Day, the Night, the Dawn, the Dusk, and on a new release of a 1985 live performance, En Concert à Paris (Ocora/Harmonia Mundi). Nusrat’s rapid improvised syllabication (Sufi scat-singing), the intense repetitions (of God’s name, of meaningless words), the great tenor shout: they can serve any purpose. Reznor has given us Nusrat as ecstasy in the face of God the Destroyer on Natural Born Killers, and Tim Robbins has given us Nusrat as the voice of God the Redeemer. Nusrat can serve any purpose. His may be the purest pop there is.

Published in April 1996