11 August 2008
The Qawwali Influence
Sufi Muslim mystical singing shapes world music
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
The track “The Face of Love” is a different sort of collaboration, featuring the lead singer for the Seattle-based alternative rock band Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder, and the great Pakistani musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and produced by Ry Cooder. Khan was a leading performer of qawwali, a genre of mystical singing practiced by Sufi Muslims in Pakistan and India. Qawwali singing is accompanied by a double-headed drum called the dholak and a portable keyboard instrument called the harmonium, which creates a continuous drone under the singing. In traditional settings the lead singer alternates stanzas of traditional poetic texts with spectacular and elaborate melodic improvisations, in an attempt to spiritually arouse his listeners and move them into emotional proximity with the Divine.
During the 1990s Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan became the first qawwali artist to command a large international following, owing to his performances at the annual WOMAD festivals curated by the rock star Peter Gabriel. Khan began to experiment with nontraditional instruments and to work with musicians outside the qawwali tradition, leading some critics to charge that the music had moved away from its spiritual roots. “All these albums are experiments,” Khan told the interviewer Ken Hunt in 1993. “There are some people who do not understand at all but just like my voice. I add new lyrics and modern instruments to attract the audience. This has been very successful.”
The 1996 film Dead Man Walking – the story of a nun’s attempt to redeem the soul of a convicted murderer on the verge of execution – was the first to foreground Khan’s contributions. Many reviews of Dead Man Walking stressed the contribution of Khan’s voice to the haunting, mystical, and spiritual atmosphere of the film. The song “The Face of Love” is based on a simple melody, sung first by Khan with lyrics in the Urdu language, and then with English lyrics by Pearl Jam’s lead singer Eddie Vedder:
Jeena kaisa Pyar bina [What is life without love] –
Is Duniya Mein Aaye ho to [Now that you have come to this world] (2x)
Ek Duje se pyar karo [Love each other, one another]
Look in the eyes of the face of love
Look in her eyes, for there is peace
No, nothing dies within pure light
Only one hour of this pure love
To last a life of 30 years
Only one hour, so calm and dark
This is not an example of music’s functioning as a universal language, for most members of the film’s American audience neither understood the words that Khan sang nor possessed any knowledge of the centuries-long history of Sufi mystical traditions. Nonetheless, it could be argued that this is a case where the well-meaning effort of artists to reach across cultural and musical boundaries does produce something like an aesthetic communion, a common purpose embodied in musical texture and poetry.
Khan’s appearance on the soundtrack of Dead Man Walking led to his being signed by the indie label American Recordings, managed by Rick Rubin, formerly the mastermind behind the rappers Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys. The American music industry’s market positioning of world music as yet another variant of alternative music is indicated by that label’s roster of artists, which included not only Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan but also the “death metal” band Slayer, the rap artist Sir MixA-Lot, and the country music icon Johnny Cash.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
