Cobwebs In the Closet #2: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's "Shahen-Shah"

There are hungers so deep they're sometimes unfathomable. Or else, we've learned early on that they're the hungers that can never be sated, those epic appetites that even history's holiest couldn't satisfy. But us laypersons who have inherited the unanswered questions of our ancestors, a lot of times we don't seem to stand a chance against the eternal. We have our lives leashed by our gravity and our weakening joints and our cravings for fried foods and our needs for sleep. Who has more than a few hours a week, at most, to devote to that endless pursuit of the universal? And really, how many of us are into that anyway?

At the risk of getting a tad too confessional (it is late, after all), this last year I've felt myself stepping away from a once-solid faith and resolving to nest my heavy hungers (quite uncomfortably) in the possibility of nothing more than a mortal life. It wasn't part of any expository, articulated turn to atheism/agnosticism - it just happened. And maybe it's easier this way, to have no dogma, to have no guilt for not being tied to dogma, to stop trying to feel so damn in touch with the unseeable (whatever that is). But mystery is mystery is mystery, whether or not you've named it or had it spelled out in scripture. As you might expect, my head still buzzes with questions, full of conflicts that linger for months, often finding no resolution.

I try to look at it all in the affirmative, which I think calms this sometimes severe separation anxiety. This distance has afforded me a certain luxury of perspective, the chance to put some words to otherwise wordless experiences. And the other night, over a hearty meal, I for some reason turned manic, thinking hard all of a sudden on what felt increasingly like a revelation: the straight-as-an-arrow parallels between song and spirit, my ever-growing iTunes library suddenly doubling as an ever-growing vessel for enlightenment, and as much as I'd thought about the notion before, I'd never felt so overwhelmingly good about it. I was starting to feel like I suddenly believed again in the possibility of believing....

Too wordy? Here's a better story:

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was born in Pakistan in 1948 to a family a Qawwali singers (the traditional devotional music of Sufis). Nusrat's father wanted his son to pursue a profession more respectable than what he saw as a lowly singer, but early on Nusrat showed an aptitude for the music, and so he went into years of training with his father until he died suddenly, when Nusrat was only eighteen. Ten days after his father's death, Nusrat dreamed his father came to him and told him he would be a singer, at which point he touched his son's throat, and Nusrat suddenly awoke from the dream...singing....

And what a voice: unfathomably loud, imbued with the raspy pathos of centuries of singers reaching for something beyond the stratosphere. You've heard it before, wafting in the background of the film scores to Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and Tim Robbins's Dead Man Walking. It's been remixed by Massive Attack, it's been featured in Peter Gabriel performances, but really, truly: it belongs way up front, leading Ali Khan's group (or "party") in the most ecstatic songs you'll ever hear. And that's exactly the point of Qawwali, always pursing that state of complete, devotional (non-booze-induced) intoxication. Circular melodies are half-sung, half-shouted in glorious call-and-response patterns by anywhere from one to twenty very sincere men. And these swirling vocal lines are propelled by hand-claps and pulsing tabla workouts that leave just enough room for one or two harmoniums to just sit back and ooze deliciously sweet major chords.

And back to that voice: holy cow. It's always moving, running up and down scales, sometimes very fast, other times especially slowly, but always moving. I guess we're a searching type of species, from our hunter-gatherer forebears to the archaeologists who dug up their bones, and it's all there in Ali Khan's voice, always pursuant of what binds past, present, and future. Legend has it he would listen to commercial jingles in whatever country he was performing in to learn the predominant scales of the region and incorporate them into his performances, hoping somehow to translate his Urdu/Punjabi/Persian/Brajbhasha lyrics into a wordless vernacular. I'd venture to say he succeeded.

Shahen-Shah (meaning "emperor") is Nusrat's most potent collection of songs, six ten-minute-plus pieces that capture the party at their most cohesive. Tracks open with single harmonium lines that are quickly joined by a hum of rising voices. There are moments you think the song is over, the hand-claps slowing their tempo and the voices quieting, but then suddenly, they all erupt at once, as though privy to some secret revelation. And gradually, as you move forward through the album, you can sense the moments coming: you settle into the hushed respites and wait to be shook out of your daze by Nusrat's ululating incantations. By the final track "Kehna Ghalat Ghalat to Chhupana Sahi Sahi," you're exhausted, but the song is perfectly slow, the rhythms perfectly lulling, the melody perfectly celebratory. You need this last statement to feel complete. It's a song for endtimes, the sound of realizing that you'll never find that unified field theory, that perhaps we are nothing more than hungry, curious beings whose capacities for comprehension are at times severely limited, and that maybe, just maybe, it's best left that way.

Amen.

"Kehna Ghalat Ghalat to Chhupana Sahi Sahi".mp3


~ Ashraf