To mark their 30th Anniversary, Real World Records (founded in 1989 by Peter Gabriel and original members of WOMAD) have released an album of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in Concert from 1985. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Live At Womad 1985 features four of the finest songs recorded at Womad on “the remote flatlands of Mersea Island in Essex…’, it opens to an epic 21 minute ‘Allah Ho Allah Ho’.
“At midnight on Saturday night, July 20, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Party took to the stage. The group sit cross-legged in two rows and for some minutes there is a silent pause. What unfolded over the following hours stunned the audience. And it impressed upon Nusrat his remarkable skill at communicating with audiences from a different culture and language and with no understanding of the deep and ancient traditions of qawwali music. Singing to a non-Asian audience for the first time this music transcended barriers and lead to a long and successful relationship with WOMAD and Real World Records and Peter Gabriel until Nusrat’s death in 1997.
“Until now this remarkable concert has been locked in archives, unheard for 34 years. The original analogue tapes have now been carefully restored and digitised. Much work has taken place at Real World Studios to regenerate the live experience…”
Paired with this release is a re-issue of Grammy-nominated Night Song (for the first time on Vinyl), a collaboration between the late Qawwali legend and Canadian rock musician Michael Brook. Accompanying the release is a video for Longing, also known as ‘Tere Bin Nahi Lagda’. The album was his final work for the label before his premature death in 1997 and Time Out called it “the best world music album… ever!” with Mojo listing the album in their Top 40 albums of 1996.
The video features footage shot in Pakistan in 1996 during the making of the documentary film Le Dernier Prophète (The Last Prophet).
If you’ve not yet seen Le Dernier Prophète, the one-hour documentary is worth seeking out – it captures the magic of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s music as well as the enthusiasm of a global audience for the qawwali master. That global adoration is felt from the start as it opens to a cab driver driving through Queens, New York who stops at an eastern cuisine restaurant attached to which is a tape cassette vendor specialising in music of Southern and Central Asia – you could easily be on the other side of the world. Here he buys his beloved tapes which he plays to passengers “even people who don’t know him…love his music”. It also features an interview with Peter Gabriel at Real World Studios where he reveals it was Pete Townsend who first encouraged him to listen to Qawwali music, a 600-year-old form of Sufi Islamic devotional music. Townsend had recently been to India where he was moved by a performance by a group of qawwali singers in the street.
When Gabriel heard Nusrat performing he described it as a spiritual experience which gave him tingles down the back of his neck. In the documentary he goes on to explain how Nusrat mastered the spiritual volume of his performances, building up an improvisation which built to such a peak that it would “enter peoples hearts”.
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