350: Shahen-Shah, by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Qawwal and Party

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Qawwal and Party (Pakistan)
Shahen-Shah (1989)
6 tracks, 71 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

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.

342: People's Colony No. 1, by Temple of Sound & Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali

Temple of Sound & Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali (United Kingdom/Pakistan)
People's Colony No. 1 (2001)
10 tracks, 65 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

I’ve always seen this album as sort of the younger sibling of the collaborations between Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook. Those releases weren’t too much earlier than this one – Mustt Mustt was from 1990, Night Song from 1996 – but they really set the stage for just what could be achieved in bringing sacred Sufi qawwali music from South Asia into the realm of world dubtronica. Together, Temple of Sound and Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali took to that stage and made it their own.

With the pedigree on display, this was always going to be an impressive album. Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali is headed by the brothers Rizwan and Muazzam Mujahid Ali Khan, nephews of Nusrat and heirs to his impressive legacy; Temple of Sound are Neil Sparkes and Count Dubulah, producers and multi-insturmentalists both, then fresh from their departure from Transglobal Underground, of which they were co-founders.

The Khan/Brook collaborations yielded indisputably genius results, but focused more on the ambient and ethereal side of electronica with more of a chill-out vibe than necessarily one for the dance floor. This album takes a different tack. This one is darker and feistier, dancier and dubbier. The programmed drums and synths pump things up to trance levels, with the tabla cycles and harmonium vamps always crucial in the mix. The soaring and ecstatic wailing from the massed voices of the qawwali party is key to the whole thing, too. The mood of the pieces is dictated by the shape of the qawwali, and the dubwise beats and bass are its servants. The album still has its more meditative moments that provide pools of cool among the fever, which slowly build back up into the most intense sections.

The idea at the core of People's Colony No. 1 was that it should be ‘21st century qawwali’ and these ebbs and flows reflect that. I would also go further and say that this is ‘international qawwali.’ Qawwali itself was always a fusion, mixing poetic and musical forms from India across to Persia, and occupying the space between classical and folk music; with Temple of Sound, Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali have kept the emotional resonances and spiritual impact of the original form while turning it into something completely different. It is clear and audible in the music that this was a real collaboration – Sparkes, Dubulah and the two Khans always there together, creating and consulting with each other all along the way.

267: Night Song, by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook (Pakistan/Canada)
Night Song (1996)
8 tracks, 48 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

When I was making up my list of Good Albums at the end of last year, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook’s Night Song basically gained an automatic entry due to its position on my ’10 days, 10 all-time favourite albums’ list that inspired this bigger project. Since then, it has been granted a fancy vinyl and downloads reissue from Real World Records, which I reviewed in the current issue of Songlines magazine. That actually throws up a bit of a quandary…I’ve just written about this album, what else is there to say?

In the review, I talked about how Brook’s production of chill-out, prog, electronica and dub works in sympathy with Khan’s heavenly qawwali vocals in a subtler, less bombastic way than the pair’s previous outing, the more successful but more controversial Mustt Mustt from 1990. I also talked about how the stand-out tracks are so effective because, even with all the additional elements and styles at play, it still retains a rolling structure in the same way as a traditional qawwali piece, which Khan’s vocals take to with a natural ease.

In magazine writing, though, and especially in reviews, restricted word counts mean that only broad strokes can really make it in, and the subtleties are often missed out. There are so many details that make Night Song impressive and important that get lost in a 200-word limit.

I didn’t get to talk about how the first track on the album ‘My Heart, My Life’ starts with the kora of Kauwding Cissokho. Just imagine: by 1996, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was world-famous for his traditional South Asian qawwali and his forward-thinking collaborations in dance music and electronica; you buy his new CD, stick it in the machine and what you’re greeted with is not the harmonium and tabla of qawwali or synths and drum sequences of electronica, but the rippling strings of the Senegalese harp. For the first minute of the album, it’s just kora and Khan’s vocals, an entirely unexpected combination that is nevertheless so delicate and peaceful. I myself could listen to a whole album of just that, but alas that never happened. As it is, this introduction helps to recalibrate the ears coming into this. You know not to expect what you had in mind, but you also know that whatever is coming up is going to be beautiful, in whatever shape it becomes.

I didn’t get to talk about how the fiasco around Mustt Mustt stemmed from Brook’s remixing of Khan’s vocals. While aesthetically reasonable from a Western standpoint – it is a classic album, after all – this technique paid little heed to the meaning of the poetry being recited, leading at points to important phrases being chopped-up half-way through, or even in the middle of words, rendering them meaningless. Even more seriously, it occasionally played with deeply religious utterances in a way that was perceived by some as corrupting and undermining the spiritual message and word of God. While Khan himself had agreed to the releasing of the album in its finished state, members of the Muslim community were understandably less than pleased. When it came to working together again on Night Song, the remixing was undertaken in a much more considered way, with Khan having a more hands-on input in the production of the album, as well as respected Muslim authorities brought in to consult on the manner in which the poetry was used. Although this is not something that can necessarily be heard by those who do not speak Farsi, Urdu or Punjabi, I think this was a very important step in world fusion: of musicians working together in equal collaboration, of differing cultural sensibilities being acknowledged and accommodated as a valuable part of the music-making process, and of artists making mistakes, owning them, learning from them and putting that learning into practice. It’s a wonderful thing to see, and the album came out even stronger for that.

I didn’t get to talk about how I connect to this album on a personal, emotional and nostalgic level. I remember sitting on the stairs of my first home, listening to this music and asking what it was. I remember lying by the patio windows in the warm sun and flicking through my dad’s record collection and putting this on, and the excitement I felt in that second or two between putting in the disc and the sound emanating from the speakers in anticipation of what I was about to hear, what I knew was my favourite album. I remember listening to it from a portable CD player in a den I built in the back garden out of posts and blankets, reading a book. I remember listening to tracks from the album on my very first mp3 player (it could only hold about 40 songs) at night while on a holiday with Scouts. Are these memories real? I don’t know. I’m not even sure the timescale lines up correctly with that first one. But listening to the album brings all those memories flooding back. Even if they’re not real, their existence in my brain is inseparable from the act of hearing the music of Night Song, just like listening to any piece of music is attached to innumerable memories and emotions that are different for every single person, meaning that everyone necessarily connects to music in their own individual way.

I didn’t get to talk about these things, and I didn’t get to talk about a million other points that make this album interesting or dated or Good or not as good as it could have been or important or influential or poignant or anything else that makes music such a vital art form in the lives and emotions of so many people. Every single album, even every piece of music, could be the subject of a detailed book about its background, its history, the making-of, the musicology of it, the production, the aftermath, the cultural significance (or insignificance), how it effects people’s lives and minds and relationships, the ramifications on the artists and other music going on into the future, and and and. Music is so deep that words themselves can never realistically hope to grasp its true nature. 200 words can never be enough…but then neither is 1000.

254: Attish: the Hidden Fire, by Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali

Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali (Pakistan)
Attish: the Hidden Fire (1998)
6 tracks, 66 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali are a qawwali party from Pakistan of the Chishtiyya Sufi order. Nowadays, they’re one of the most famous exponents of the traditional qawwali style in the world, but back when this album, their debut, was released, they were emerging talents. Led by Rizwan and Muazzam Mujahid Ali Khan, their uncle was the great qawwal Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who had just died the previous year leaving an emptiness in his place that has still never been filled. Nevertheless, people were looking for the ‘next big thing’ in qawwali, and up stepped Rizwan-Muazzam, already fully-formed and raring to take on the international scene. They later went on to experiment with various international sounds just like their uncle, but with Attish: the Hidden Fire, they showed off their chops in a traditional setting with a modern attitude.

It’s qawwali, and it’s very high-quality, so I think there is little in general that I can say that I haven’t said before about the beauty of the style. Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali are perhaps a little unusual by the fact that they have two lead vocalists instead of a soloist, but that’s not unheard of by any stretch, and their recognisable voices add a novel element as the album progresses.

So this album is another one where I’m going to be focussing on one piece of music in particular. Specifically, the last track on the album and therefore, I guess, probably the one people are most likely to miss. It’s called ‘Ali Ali Khena’, a song of praise to Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law and the one through whom Chishtiyya Sufis trace their spiritual lineage. A few years ago, I was playing this album for the first time in quite a while, and this track absolutely floored me to the degree that I play it very often nowadays. The reason why has become a slight mantra for this blog, and so I hope you won’t be too annoyed when I say: BLUES! This track is as close to a blues qawwali as you’re going to get without some ill-advised cross-cultural fusions. It’s not just a slight hinting at it with one or two notes here or there either, when that refrain comes around, ‘dam dam dam Ali Ali khena madhe Ali Ali khena, it hits every single note of the blues scale, and doesn’t deviate from it either. The groove, even though it’s based on the typical qawwali rhythm, seems to roll along with a real strut, and the harmonium sounds like it’s being played by someone well-versed in Hammond organ at times, especially at the beginning.

I wonder how much of that track’s bluesiness is intentional. It is entirely possible that it’s a complete coincidence – the scale used (that corresponds with the blues scale) is very similar to the raga Puriya Dhanashri, perhaps it’s just a natural progression from there. Whatever it is, I love it. And there’s a lesson in listening: never drop that attention before the end of the album – you never know what surprises await in the humble last track.

245: Seize the Time, by Fun^da^Mental

Fun^da^Mental (United Kingdom/Pakistan)
Seize the Time (1994)
14 tracks, 84 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

From the very beginning of the album, you know Seize the Time is not going to be a comfortable listen. To start the first track of your debut album with a truly disgusting and horrific 30-second-long answer-machine message from a cockney racist, full of P-words, N-words and C-words and ending in a chilling death threat. It’s a really affective opener, shocking, and it’s an inspired way to start the album. Because it shouldn’t be a comfortable listen; these are not comfortable topics.

And that’s the way the album continues. I usually find ‘unapologetic’ a weird word to be applied to artists going against the mainstream – why should they ever be ‘apologetic’ in the first place? – but I think it’s quite well-placed for Fun^da^Mental, and Aki Nawaz in particular. They are not here to make polite requests; they’re not here to give you pleasant, comfortably unfamiliar Asian music to boost your progressive cred. They’re not going to sit around and allow you to put them in the world music box, or the Asian underground box, or any box at all. They’re difficult, and fuck you for thinking your opinion matters.

The uncompromising lyrics talk about what it was like to live life while being young, Asian, British and Muslim in the early 1990s without pulling any of the punches, and they still – sadly, angrily – hold too much weight even 25 years later. They’re all held together by a supreme musical tapestry that similarly reflects the soundscape of Britain for young British-Asians: it’s very much in the old school hip-hop mould, but the instrumentals are full of quotes and inspirations from Bollywood, bhangra, South Asian classical music and other folk music, as well as jungle, dub, electronica and lots of punk in both sound and attitude. There’s also a liberal dousing of spoken samples, from the inspirational (Malcolm X) to the rage-inducing (predictably-Tory MP Alan Clark). The group’s place in the fledgling world dubtronica scene is felt with the inclusion of Transglobal Underground’s Tim Whelan, Neil Sparkes and Nick Page.

It’s always maddening when art made through injustice retains its meaning with very little change over such a long period of time. The great thing about music, though, is that it helps – awareness is heightened, people get angry and the groundswell continues. Seize the Time is just as important to listen to now as it was in 1994 – revisit it if you’ve not for a while, and listen and learn if you’ve never experienced. Get furious. We need that now.

130: The Rough Guide to Asian Underground, by Various Artists

Various Artists (United Kingdom/South Asia)
The Rough Guide to Asian Underground (2003)
15 tracks, 78 minutes
Another one that can’t be listened to or downloaded online for some reason. Here’s a Spotify playlist I made, but it is missing a few tracks, unfortunately. You can still buy the CD at the World Music Network, or even more cheaply second-hand on Amazon.

For a really long time, the Rough Guide series from the World Music Network was one of the most valuable resources in world music, providing impressively in-depth and well-rounded introductions to music scenes by region, culture or genre in the space of a single CD each, often with short but informative essays and track breakdowns in the sleeves. There were so many excellent Rough Guide compilations that I had to be careful not to fill this blog up with them. It’s a shame that lately, although WMN still puts out Rough Guides, they are nowhere near the standard they once were – nowadays they seem to mostly be excuses to repackage material from their sister label Riverboat Records, and there’s not a sleeve note in sight. Ah well. This is a blog for Good Albums, so let’s look at one of them, then.

The Asian Underground scene was quite a big deal in the UK of the 1990s, and must surely have been one of the most exciting musical movements to be a part of (although I cannot speak from experience – I was a little kid growing up in the middle of nowhere in the north-west, but still). UK-based musicians and producers with backgrounds from all over South Asia were diving into the latest styles of electronica and dance music, as well as hip-hop, jungle, new age, dub and punk, and bringing along a unique Asian spin on things by introducing elements from what they heard at home: Indian classical music, Bollywood songs, qawwali, bhangra and all sorts.

The Rough Guide to Asian Underground has all of the factors that made the Rough Guide series so essential for listeners of good music from anywhere. For starters, it was compiled by DJ Ritu, who was one of the key players in the scene herself and responsible for a lot of the attention that came its way – who better suited to give the most succinct yet detailed introduction to it?

All the obvious and most well-known names of the scene are here of course, such as Asian Dub Foundation, Black Star Liner, the State of Bengal and Fun^da^Mental (whose track ‘Ja Sha Taan’ is probably the best on here, making excellent use of samples from the qawwali of Nawazish Ali Khan and the 1940s jazz-blues of Hot Lips Page). But there’s also some interesting and unexpected entries here. The album starts with ‘Streets of Calcutta’, a great track from sitarist Ananda Shankar from all the way back in 1975 that shows how deep the roots of Asian Underground go; there’s also some of Talvin Singh’s earliest work under the moniker Mahatma T with the track ‘Jihad’ from the 80s – he would later go on to be one of the biggest names in the Asian Underground scene, even making it overground as the first (and so far only) British-Asian winner of the Mercury Prize in 1999. And then there’s also a handful of tracks that were as-then unreleased, including one by another big name, Joi.

Now that is how you introduce a musical scene in a way that can get newcomers hooked and show them what they need to know while also including new bits and pieces to interest those already familiar with it. Bravo, DJ Ritu; World Music Network, take note.

019: Star Rise, by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Michael Brook (Pakistan/Canada)
Star Rise (1997)
9 tracks, 58 minutes (original CD version)
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is, for my money, simply the greatest singer ever recorded. And he was recorded a lot. Every time I listen to him, the shivers are real. At the heart of everything he did was qawwali. Qawwali is a style of poetry and song used by Sufi Muslims of South Asia to praise god. It’s a very powerful music, and its sound can send listeners into fits of religious ecstasy. A chorus of heavenly voices, a couple of harmoniums, tablas and hours of powerful handclaps – a qawwali performance is one of the most electrifying live experiences you can have.

But as much as he was undisputed Shahenshah-e-Qawwali – the King of Kings of Qawwali – Nusrat was super open with his collaborations with producers and fellow musicians. This is totally evident on Star Rise. The tracks on this album are remixes taken from Nusrat’s two collabs with Canadian producer Michael Brook. Each of the remixes were made by a leading light in the UK’s Asian Underground scene, which, at this point in the mid-90s, was in full swing. Just look at those names: Joi, Talvin Singh, Asian Dub Foundation, State of Bengal, Aki Nawaz and Fun^da^Mental, Black Star Liner, Nitin Sawhney, Earthtribe and The Dhol Foundation. It just goes to show the esteem that Nusrat was held in – when the call comes to work with him, you don’t say no.

Because of the number and variety of remixers taking part, the remix styles are similarly broad, with bits and bobs from techno to electronica, bhangra to Bollywood, and the ever-present dub, and there’s the whole range here from bangers to pure chill-outs. On the ‘banger’ end of the spectrum – I would go as far to say it is an ‘absolute banger’ - is the Asian Dub Foundation’s remix of the track ‘Taa Deem.’ This is my favourite piece of music of all time. ADF use Nusrat’s vocals with respect but without piety, and turn it into a hardcore dub-dance-punk with some exquisite drops. Words can’t really describe, just go listen.

Make sure your bass is properly set up before you press play on this album, though. If your insides aren’t wobbling all the way around your torso, you’re missing out.