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Al Jadid Magazine, Vol. 3, no. 20 (Summer 1997) Death of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Stuns International Followers The centuries-old ecstatic qawwali music of Pakistan has found an enduring niche in the West, despite the recent death of the internationally-acclaimed exemplar, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the artist who fostered ancient music's international appeal. Just two weeks after the 49-year-old Khan's death in London on August 16, his cousin and protegee, Ustad Badar Ali Khan, electrified a festival audience in Los Angeles at the Greek Theater, inspiring dozens of neo-hippy Westerners as well as Pakistanis to leap to their feet and dance. The spontaneous outburst continued on stage, as the dancing fans jumped and gyrated inches away from the platform where Ustad and the eight-member chorus played music that is famous in the West for being "trance-inducing." While that was not precisely the kind of trance that qawwali engenders in a more ritualized setting with an audience more attuned to the mystical tradition, the enthusiastic outpouring demonstrates that Western audiences have been well primed by the late master, and are in no hurry to let go of the mesmerizing music. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was born in Faisalabad in 1948, and his death on August 16 in a London hospital came just as his homeland was celebrating its 50th year of existence as an independent state. Pakistan's official APP news agency said the singer was taken to the hospital after he suffered "complications of renal failure due to diabetes." He had stopped in London for a few days on way his from Pakistan to the U.S., where he was to have had a kidney transplant. Newspapers throughout the globe, including the Arab World, carried reports of his passing, with headlines in the Los Angeles Times calling him a "world music star." The classically-trained singer and composer had spent his life mastering, and then popularizing the traditional qawwali music in the West. It was Sufi music, and Sufi music had never before reached so many of the world's peoples. In his homeland, Nusrat was admired as the scion of a family of distinguished classical musicians. Although he was less well-known as a classical singer, he was acknowledged for his great mastery of classical ragas. But it was in the qawwali form than he shone brightest. Pakistanis called him shahen-sha-e-qawwali, the king of kings, the brightest star of qawwali. And it was the qawwali form which captivated audiences throughout the world, transcending language, culture and religious identity. He drew enthusiastic crowds for his U.S. concert appearances, filling L.A.'s Universal Amphitheatre in 1996 with flag-waving Pakistani immigrants as well as American-born adherents of Sufism and rock-oriented aficionados with no particular background in mystical tradition. Most of the more recent fans only knew that Khan's music touched their inner being. They were stirred and gladdened, and they wanted more. His first American appearance was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in 1989. In 1992, he taught music as an artist-in-residence at the University of Washington. His first widespread visibility came with his performance on the soundtrack of the 1995 film Dead Man Walking. His music was also heard in the soundtrack for Hollywood's The Last Temptation of Christ, and India's controversial Hindi film, Bandit Queen. Qawwali a la Khan swept through Europe, infusing the Western rock genre as he experimented with performers such as Peter Gabriel, U2 and Sting. He thus brought many elements of the musical tradition into the Western mainstream, but it was in the more traditional format that his artistry rang most true. Qawwali is first and foremost a devotional celebration of mystical love and unity with the divine, in the Sufi tradition. The term qawwali itself translates as "utterance" in Urdu, and stems from the Arabic qua'ol, meaning an expression recited to purify mind and action. It had its origins in the practice of sama', or listening, in which the seeker might enter a trance-like state, experiencing revelation and ecstasy. Qawwali music stems from the 10th Century, having probably been introduced by Persian Sufi poet and composer Hazrat Amir Khusrau, and was associated primarily with the Chisti Sufi Order. There is no set program in a qawwali recital. After opening with a song in praise of God, the artist, based on his mood or the occasion, selects a principal poem--a ghazal for the night. Singing in Farsi, Urdu or Punjabi, Nusrat Khan would typically begin his intonation in a muted tone, taking his time to let it build into an increasingly more complex ascent, as the audience is swept along. Even to the untrained ear, Khan's music, as heard in concert halls and in numerous recordings, had the ability to transport the listener. For those unable to understand the words, Khan once noted that "the exact effect sought by the master's words will be created by the music alone." The melodic lines are drawn from North Indian modalities, laced with intervals employing ornamentation and improvisation. While the ensemble consists of harmonium, stringed instruments and drums, rhythm is the most prominent musical characteristic of qawwali, and hand-clapping contributes to the percussive line. For those who understand the language, the play of words is a symphony in itself, as the soloist and the chorus weave a kind of word-jazz, jumping to other poems to amplify a given verse, or stopping at one phrase or word to accentuate it with a cascade of repetitions, as in the Sufi practice of dhikr in which the name of God is "remembered" by repeating it. Within that context, and within the ritualized communal setting, pure qawwali is one of the musical forms considered acceptable in Sufism, despite the orthodox Islamic ban on music as a secular pursuit, according to Regula Qureshi, professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Alberta, Canada, writing in program notes for Khan's 1993 World Music Institute tour. It's all geared to induce a properly ecstatic hal or state in the audience. The gradual escalation en masse of the audience into such a state poses a major responsibility for the master qawwali, who carefully monitors his "passengers" as if he were an airline pilot. And indeed, one of Nusrat's favorite verses written by Amir Khusrau, states: "It is the courage of each, it is the power of flight; some fly and remain in the garden, some go beyond the stars." Those fortunate enough to have been in the audience at a performance by this musical guide to states-beyond-the-stars will never forget the euphoric radiance of Khan's expressive face, crowning his more than ample form. He was an artist who radiated humility as well as transcendent confidence. In the world of musical art, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a high-suspension bridge, spanning not only East and West, but with the arc of timeless genius, closing the gap between earth and heaven with timeless songs of divine love. "He was a pure channel of love for God," said Los Angeles-based Hamid Al-Turkiye, a North African born follower of the Sufi path. "You could not listen to him without being drawn one breath nearer to the divine, even if you didn't know what was happening to you." "Just listening to him made joy bubble up inside the heart," recalled Yahya, an American student of Sufism living in Northern California. It was a joy found only among children and friends of the divine-- a joy that resonated in the hearts of those who sat before him so that they, too, took flight. *Judith Gabriel is a Los Angeles based journalist, writer, and playwright. She was the news director at pacifica, Los Angeles, where she also produced and hosted Middle East in Focus for Five Years. |
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