Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: The Embassy of France in Pakistan and Alliance Francaise d’ Islamabad arranged a qawwali musical evening to pay tribute to qawwali legend Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

A foreword was presented by Monsieur Pierre Alain Baud on the occasion who also wrote a book on Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, The Messenger Of Qawwali, featuring the life and works of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

The qawwali evening mesmerised the audience of the twin cities comprising fun lovers and fans of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in a relaxing ambiance of soul soothing melodies recalling the qawwali style of the legendary qawwal and music maestro Nusrat.

Pierre Alain Baud has published the first ever biography on Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in the French speaking world. Not only is Pierre Alain Baud a researcher, artistic counsellor and journalist, but he is also interested in spreading the artistic expressions of the “Sufi east into our world”, said the organisers.

Pierre Alain Baud himself has worked many years alongside with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, thus contributing to organising many of his international tours and meetings on and off in Pakistan. He has written several books, CDs, booklets, researched articles, around the music of Pakistan and Sufism.

According to him, instrumental music has one big advantage over vocal music, it has no linguistic barriers to surmount. There is one vocalist, the Pakistani qawwal Nusrat Fateh Ali, whose popularity not only crossed the geographical boundaries but also linguistic, cultural, social and even generational barriers.

Nusrat was not the first qawwal to perform in the West, there were quite a few: most notable among them was Ghulam Farid Sabri, but their audiences were primarily the sub-continental diaspora. With Nusrat, whether he performed in Europe, North America or Brazil, the men and women entranced by his exciting and spiritually stimulating numbers were locals in large numbers.

Baud didn’t take much time to discover the innumerable facets of Nusrat’s personality: enigmatic and innocent, colossal and peaceful, inspired and ordinary, all parts of the same person who captivated audiences in Lahore, Paris, Florence, Tokyo or New York.

The Voice of Faith reproduces the maestro’s family tree going back to nine generations. The text recalls how Nusrat was first trained by his father Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, who wanted his son to enter the medical profession but changed his mind when the boy, still in his teens, accompanied Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan’s son Munawar Ali Khan on the tabla in a concert. The exponent of classical music, on a visit from India, was all praise for the virtuosity of the teenager.

The writer captures the details of Nusrat’s highly successful forays into films not just in the subcontinent but also in the Western world. He also throws light on hundreds of cassettes and CDs of his renditions that were released in his lifetime and many more after his death, his albums were featured in Guinness World Records.