Nusrat Khan Fateh Ali & Party - Chain Of Light (Deluxe Edition) LP

$36.98

A new album of unheard recordings by the Pakistan musical icon Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan will be released 34 years after they were recorded. The ‘lost album’ — named Chain Of Light — was discovered in the tape archives of Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records, the label that signed Khan in 1989 and released a series of universally acclaimed albums with him throughout the 1990s.

Joined by his eight-strong party of singers and musicians, Chain Of Light presents four traditional qawwals (Sufi Islamic devotional songs) — including one which has never been heard before — and captures Khan at the height of his vocal capabilities in pristine sonic quality. The recording was made at Real World Studios in April 1990, during the same time he worked on Mustt Mustt, his seminal crossover album with Canadian producer Michael Brook.

Descended from a 600-year-old lineage of qawwali singers, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s voice has been singularly responsible for spreading the devotional music of Sufism to the world, ever since he became the leader of his family’s musical group in 1971. At turns heavy and hulkingly powerful, yet agile and pointedly precise, his vocal not only embodies the tradition of the Sufi qawwali but it is the emotive essence of singing itself.

Over the course of his musical career, Khan became a cultural icon whose list of esteemed fans extended well beyond the Islamic world and into the realm of western rock and pop. The late Jeff Buckley famously said of the singer “He’s my Elvis” and Khan counted amongst his fans The Rolling Stones, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder. His voice also appeared on the soundtrack of movies by Hollywood directors Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Tim Robbins.