Peter Gabriel, from Genesis to Growing Up

In contrast to his relationship of equals with Youssou N'Dour, Gabriel has
proclaimed the qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan as a major influence. In
his tribute to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan following the latter's death in 1997, Gabriel
wrote ‘My two main singing inspirations, Nusrat and Otis Redding, have been
supreme examples of how far and deep a voice can go in finding, touching and
moving the soul' (RWN 5: 1997).

Peter Gabriel first heard Khan in 1981, when a cassette of his music was sent
to the WOMAD organizers by a Mr Ayub of Oriental Star Recordings in Pakistan.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan subsequently appeared at the WOMAD event in Mersea,
Essex in 1985, and Real World records issued eight of his albums before his
death.

Coming from one of the two great families of Pakistani qawwali performers,
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was one of the leading figures in the genre, which is a
devotional music of Sufi Muslims. The texts of all Khan's performances and
recordings have a religious basis and, as such, it was surprising that he was
able to adjust to the secular contexts in which he made his world music festival
appearances and recordings, as well as the film soundtracks into which his music
was incorporated.

Interviewed by David Toop in Lahore in 1996, Khan took an almost ecumenical
view of his role: “The message of quawwali is not only for Muslims. There have
been very great people in all religions. Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, they all had good
Sufis. The message of the Sufis is the same - how to reach to God - but they all
have different ways' (Toop 1999: 211). Another explanation for this flexibility can
be found in Regula Burkhardt Qureshi's study of a leading qawwali musician in
India, where she analyses the context sensitive grammar of the music through
which the context of performance shapes the course of the music (Qureshi 1986).
The unlikely incorporation of his music into films was also used as a
tribute to Khan at a concert in Pakistan witnessed by Toop. 'the MC bawled his
introduction: “Last Temptation of Christ, Dead Man Walking, Bandit Queen,
Natural Born Killers” (Toop 1999: 209). The track used in Natural Born Killers
was ‘Taboo', a collaboration between Khan and Gabriel, which Ashwani Sharma
says has a double effect, both as a 'management of Otherness ... within a centred
hegemonic discourse' and an undermining of 'a misanthropic whiteness' through
its 'uncontrollable "alien” presence within the anarchic play of the film' (Sharma
1996: 29). Film music was the site of most of the collaborations between the two,
although a track featuring Khan's voice was included posthumously on Gabriel's
2002 solo album Up.

The most radical recontextualization of Khan's devotional music occurred in
his studio collaborations with Canadian-born producer Michael Brook. There, the
Khan voice was placed in a musical context wholly separate from his group of
qawwali singers and instrumentalists, and placed in front of synthesizer and guitar
sounds, as on the albums Mustt Mustt (1990) and Night Song (1996). The booklet
notes to Mustt Mustt describe how some of the tape edits 'were not acceptable to
Nusrat, because we'd cut a phrase in half - sometimes there were lyrics that we