Revellers on Essex’s Mersea Island were transfixed by the sheer spiritual power of Khan’s first performance outside south Asia, which marked a turning point in attitudes towards global musicRead all of the pieces in the 20 iconic festival sets seriesNusrat 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.