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.
Born of a 600-year-old line of qawwali singers, Khan’s grasp of music as a form of spiritual communication was acute. 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. 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. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice is quite unlike any other.
