MUSIC / Overflowing with Eastern promise: Was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan the best singer in the world ?

Geoff Dyer argues the case for Master Of Islamic Music

 

IN ISLAMIC countries, in the desert, it sometimes seems as if the call to prayer, although issuing from the minaret, is actually summoned into being by the vastness of the sky. As if the call is itself a response to the immensity of the surrounding silence . . .

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, 'Shahen-shah-e- qawali' - 'the brightest shining star of qawali' - sits cross-legged, barefoot on the concert stage. To his left are the other members of his 'party': eight-man chorus, tabla player, two men on hand-pumped harmonia and, furthest from him, the youngest member of the ensemble, his teenage pupil. Over the drone of the harmonia the chorus sets up a slow pattern of hand-claps. As simple as that. The clapping initiates a rhythm of expectation, a yearning that cries out for the Voice, which will become the medium of still greater yearning. As soon as we hear it - minutes into a performance which will last for hours and leave us dazed and ecstatic - we are held by its implacable power.
In our century there have been only one or two voices like this: voices that cry out beyond the cry, that rend the soul even as they soothe it. A voice like this - like the voice of Callas or of the great Egyptian singer Om Calsoum - longs to be answered by something as beautiful as itself. And so it soars. Higher and further, until it consumes and destroys itself. Or until it finds God. That is why, on Peter Gabriel's soundtrack to Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, it is Nusrat's voice you hear in the climactic moments of the Passion.