Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan came from a family tradition of qawwali stretching back centuries, yet he was unusually open to placing that tradition inside unfamiliar musical environments. His 1990 collaboration with Canadian guitarist and producer Michael Brook, Mustt Mustt, moved qawwali into contemporary studio production without simply abandoning the voice and improvisational intensity at its centre.
The album even included a Massive Attack remix of the title track.
That interests me because remix culture and devotional music appear, at first, to come from completely different ideas about what music is for.
But both understand repetition.
Qawwali can build emotional intensity through repeated phrases and improvisational expansion. Electronic dance music can build intensity by looping material while gradually changing its context.
The meeting therefore makes more sense structurally than stylistically.
A remix does not necessarily need to reduce a tradition to a fashionable beat.
Sometimes two musical systems discover that they already share a way of building time.
