Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Womad 1985: the qawwali star invokes rapture

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice is quite unlike any other. At turns heavy and hulkingly powerful, yet also nimble and pointedly precise, his vocalisations have come to epitomise not only the tradition of the Sufi qawwali but the art of singing itself.

The qawwali is an Islamic devotional music designed to bring its performers and audience to a state of rapture and trance-like communion with the divine. Born of a 600-year-old line of qawwali singers, Khan’s grasp of music as a form of spiritual communication was acute. For the few thousand attendees at the Womad festival in 1985 witnessing Khan perform for the first time outside of south Asia, their experience would have been one of unexpected transcendence.

Peter Gabriel had begun the festival only three years earlier as a western showcase of music from around the world, as well as that of his peers. The first edition, held in the Somerset town of Shepton Mallet, saw performances by Gabriel, Indian sitar player Imrat Khan and free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry. Poor access to the festival site and low attendance almost sunk Womad in its first year, but a well-timed reunion concert for Gabriel’s old band Genesis kept them afloat.

On the weekend of 19 July 1985, revellers travelled to the tiny Mersea Island in Essex for headliners New Order, the Fall and Toots and the Maytals. For the large majority, Khan would have been an obscure name – perhaps one mistakenly associated with the vastly different practice of the sitar raga popularised two decades earlier by Ravi Shankar.

At midnight, after all the other performances had finished for the day, attendees witnessed Khan taking to the cramped, carpeted stage with his Party: nine members of his extended family of qawwali players, including his brother Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan on the harmonium. It was balmy and mercifully dry when promoter Muhammad Ayyub introduced them as “the most famous qawwal in the Indian subcontinent” before Farrukh’s harmonium gently piped in, playing the opening alap for Allah Ho. This 20-minute qawwal unfurls like one long crescendo, luring the listener in to its softly accelerating, swung beat of tablas and hand claps before suddenly Khan’s voice arrives.

Listening to a recently digitised recording of the show now, it is still shocking in its force. Farrukh opens by singing along with his harmonium melody, yet Nusrat soon overtakes with a throaty, air-gulping yawp, leaping sideways into a high-register harmony. He leads the charge, the entire Party soon clapping in unison as he swaps phrases with child singer Kaukab Ali before they build to Khan’s signature sargam: a rapid-fire wordless vocalisation over chromatic scales in which Khan dances through melody like a bebop sax player through the pounding of drums.

The Party follow that electric opening and rounds of applause with what would become one of Khan’s biggest commercial successes, Haq Ali Ali, a mid-tempo ode to the revered Sufi figure of the prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law. Then comes tabla player Dildar Hussain working up a polyrhythmic sweat during the raucous choral celebration of Shabhaz Qalandaz. Closing with a love song, or ghazal, Biba Sada Dil Morr De, Khan finds new gymnastic phrasings through the repetition of the song’s title, yearning as his husky voice cracks before each breath: “Give my heart back,” he entreats in Urdu.

It is hard to overstate how important this concert was, not only for the assembled crowd, but Khan, too. After he had spent 14 years as the head of his family’s qawwal troupe, building a reputation as a religious performer in India and Pakistan, his Womad set brought him the secular fame and commercial viability of the western music industry. Here his music would inspire a new-age spiritualism of an entirely different kind.

Months after Womad, Khan travelled to Paris where he made a series of beautiful live recordings for the Ocora label, as well as in London for the Indian music label Navras. In 1989, once Gabriel had founded his own Real World Records, Khan went on to release some of his most experimental and engaging albums under the imprint, such as 1990’s Mustt Mustt. In 1997, he died suddenly at the age of just 48.

Khan’s 1985 Womad performance finds him at the raw prime of his talent. As the first generation of the British Asian community was coming of age and finding its own identity, so Khan’s alighting in the nation would have been a cultural lodestone; a bridge to the past of their parents, as well as an acknowledgment of their diasporic present. It not only marked a turning point in attitudes towards global music in the UK, but among qawwal practitioners themselves. Until Khan started playing internationally, this music was considered a purely religious expression. The first of his many performances in secular environments helped transform this powerful, devotional form into an emblem of south Asian culture recognised around the world.