America has soul music, but along a line running from Syria to Uzbekistan there is an Oriental equivalent known as sufi music: Sufis, with their timeless message of peace and love, are the soul singers of Islam. In Pakistan these musicians are called qawwals, and the greatest qawwali singer of all time was - until his untimely death five years ago - Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. “Out of a thousand listeners,” he once said, “even if just one feels closer to his Creator, then my work is done.” Sufi culture recognises two equal forms of blessedness: having a melodious voice, and having the capacity to appreciate one.

Qawwali is both a ritual and a musical genre, and though the latter is based on the melodic structures of Indian classical music, it is regarded as not quite classical - the disqualifying elements being the use of clapping plus a male-voice chorus. As Jameela Siddiqi observes in the liner-note to her superb CD The Rough Guide to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (RGNET 1078), male offspring in families of hereditary qawwali musicians are taught to clap in time before they can even walk.

It was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan who single-handedly put qawwali on the international map. Its freewheeling modes can be initially hard on the Western ear: what sold it was this man’s extraordinary vocal virtuosity. He could holler with rasping roughness, and he could weave the most delicate melismas (a group of notes sung to one syllable); he was adept at pacing his long solos - the 10-minute tracks on this record are mere excerpts - and he was equally adept at building to a blazing climax. All these songs are ecstatically in praise of Allah and his saints, but they range from intimate religious rituals to orchestrated numbers complete with attendant female choruses in the Bollywood mode. For that was the main point about him: as demonstrated in a Womad recording - Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Party (RWMCD3) - he could also see the sacred in the secular.

Michael Church