Comment: I had not heard of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan before reading this Guardian article. 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. I then listen to one of his performances and found it entranced me. Click here to experience him yourself
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 music….
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.
It is hard to overstate how important this concert was, not only for the assembled crowd, but Khan, too. After he had spent 14 years as the head of his family’s qawwal troupe, building a reputation as a religious performer in India and Pakistan, his Womad set brought him the secular fame and commercial viability of the western music industry. Here his music would inspire a new-age spiritualism of an entirely different kind.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…..Via theguardian.com