Shahen-Shah (1989)
6 tracks, 71 minutes
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After so many times of talking about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s worldly collaborations, his inclusions on compilation albums, people who have covered his songs (in often unusual ways), his protégés, relations and fellow qawwals…we finally get to listen to a whole album of Khan Sahib doing what he did best: singing qawwalis alongside his party, in a traditional style and being simply the greatest singer of all time.
Shahenshah mean ‘king of kings,’ and that’s who Khan was – the shahenshah-e-qawwali. That title was bestowed upon him before he made this album; he was already held in the highest regard among Sufi Muslims and South Asians with even a passing interest in music, his songs reaching across barriers of language and faith. Then came Shahen-Shah, the album. Recorded in 1988 at Real World Studios, and released the year after, it was Khan’s first album on Real World Records. It wasn’t his first release in the west, but it’s the one that turned him from a superstar in half the globe, to a megastar all over it.
No wonder. I can’t imagine being able to listen to this album and not be transported. Religiously, spiritually, cerebrally, whatever’s your bag, Khan takes you somewhere else. Khan himself would call it wajd – the state of spiritual ecstasy that marks a nearing to God. And all it takes is two hand-pumped harmoniums, a pair of tabla drums and nine massed male voices, of which Khan is naturally the focal point. The poetry is in Urdu, Punjabi and Farsi and can date right back to the founding of the Sufi orders, some even to the 10th century. They talk about the love for God, for his prophet Muhammad, for the Caliphs and for the Sufi saints, often in swirling metaphors of drunkenness, intoxication or erotic love but always with the divine at the core of their very meaning.
And Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice is heavenly. It’s exquisite. He makes the soul swoop, and brings tears to the eyes. What he creates comes from somewhere deeper than the lungs, and lands deeper than the ear – it is heart-to-heart music. Any superlatives can be applied without overstatement. I have never heard a voice that comes close. Deep-chested bellows; impossibly high-pitched almost-screams; whispered fast-paced passages; long meditations on one single syllable that slide between notes with majestic weight; impishly playful flutters up and down and through and in between ragas, talas and his own accompanying singers and musicians; all of it is perfection. What more to say about such a singer, such a messenger, such a more-than-man?
I’m not sure if I ever saw Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan perform live. I probably did, if I was paying attention, but I was far too young to notice, and no memory of it remains. I wish I could experience that again, with a conscious, memory-making mind, but it’s never to be. A whole concert of hour upon hour of such mastery, unbound to 15 minute pieces, must have been a miracle to witness. His music, however, is luckily not so tethered to this mortal coil as he himself was. Shahen-Shah and albums like it are so beautifully recorded that the music echoes throughout time, crystal clear, reverberating the soul. We should honour and treasure such relics – they surely came from another place.
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