QAWWALI
Nusrat’s Chain of Light
In the anticipation of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s lost album from 1990
Recently, I was watching a documentary about when Jay Z and Linkin Park came together to do Encore. It was a massive moment in musical history. I’ve always thought Linkin Park and Nusrat would have made a crazy combination — what a treat that would have been. Maybe AI will give us that mix soon, but it won’t be the real thing. To be honest, neither would have been Linkin Park and Nusrat because the real thing is coming on the 20th of September 2024.
An album that was recorded by Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records was stored in boxes somewhere. The team only found it while they were moving their storage during the coronavirus pandemic. Aren’t I, and possibly hundreds of thousands of other people, glad that they found it? We are, and we are thankful, too, to the recordists, the engineers, the qawwals, and everyone else involved with the project.
Although I’m incredibly excited to listen to the upcoming recordings, I’m as excited when I find an unheard recording of his, however bad the quality, on YouTube. It never ceases to surprise me that whenever I put some effort into finding a new and unheard recording, I always end up finding one. And I’m not the sort of person who listens to Nusrat only once in a…
