By the time the great Nusrat died of a heart attack in 1997 at the woefully young age of 48, he was just beginning to enjoy the golden aura of international recognition. It would be exaggerating to say he was a star or commercial hit in the West, but he was at least the cognoscenti’s darling around these parts. And it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say he was probably the greatest singer in the world.
He was the Pavarotti of qawwali, a Sufi devotional music that for obvious reasons wasn’t in heavy rotation on MTV. Qawwali songs are based on spiritual texts and are lyrically a combination of holy words and nonsense sounds which augment the transcendent aural experience.
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Nusrat first pierced Western consciousness at WOMAD, the annual World of Music, Arts and Dance festival, in 1985, where he was a revelation. Soon after he signed for Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records, releasing Mustt Mustt in 1990. Rarely is a record genuinely seminal, but this was, introducing half the planet to a unique, mesmerizing sound. He had already appeared as an exotic presence on Gabriel’s 1989 soundtrack Passion, for the movie The Last Temptation of Christ.
And now, nearly three decades after his passing, Real World has released a “lost” record, Chain of Light, recorded in 1990. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful album, Nusrat at his full powers, his eight accompanying musicians and vocalists at their peak too. It’s like he never left.
The first thing that strikes me about this, though, is, how the hell do you lose an album? I mean, doesn’t someone remember they did another record with perhaps the greatest voice of all time?
Anyway, they found it, when they were moving warehouses or something, so, you know, all’s well that ends well.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.