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The Unexpurgated intros for the Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Interview by Jeff Buckley [1966-1997]

Recently, I had the honor of actually meeting and conducting an interview with a man I deeply revere … above all other artists, I think. If you don’t know the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn then I’ll leave you with a recommended list at the end of this little deal. There’s actually going to be a Tim Robbins feature coming out sometime that has a soundtrack of his music along with a couple of songs that are duets with Eddie Vedder. I hear they rule. They will. But its different music than what I’m actually talking about here. I’m talking about Qawwali music, the music of the Sufis.

INTERVIEW MAGAZINE wanted to have me interview Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn for the new January Issue. I’ve always wanted to meet him, so I agreed to come to his hotel and talk with him for an hour or so into a tape recorder. I came in without any prepared questions. It was to make sure that we could be more natural and spontaneous.

Bad ****ing idea. I should’ve come prepared. Still, I haven’t gotten over it, I had the most exciting afternoon of my life, hands down.

After helping with the transcription of the interview, I wrote two short intros for the piece. The first one, I didn’t like so much. I wrote a second one to replace it for publication. Neither of them appear in their original form in the January Issue of INTER- VIEW MAGAZINE. They appear in their Edited form. They shaved some of the hair off of what I actually wanted to say in the process. It’s embarrassing to read. Here is the final draft of what I originally submitted.

……. The sound of love opens doors. The inner devotion of his heart has opened the doors of his own development from a small child in Pakistan, deemed to soft in fortitude to carry on the family mantel of their Qawwali tradition, to an immovable master of the art of song.

It is soaring, healing, penetrating music that rips the sky open, slowly revealing the radiant face of the Beloved. I am not joking this is not poetry or critical hyperbole. This is what you get when you pay for your ticket and sit down at the gig. How can a man fly effortlessly through the air and still look like he carries the ancient weight of six hundred years that is the art of Quawwli happily on his shoulders and into the present? *

The Sight of it is beautiful and free and freeing. Nusrat Fateh ALi Khan and the ten other men in his ensemble do not play music, they are music itself. The audiences are sleepwalking schools of souls hooked from the mouth and pulled gloriously down into wells of exaltation as a few music critics sit and scribble away, head down to the notepad . By the end of the night no one is immune to the spirit that clouds the auditorium. All eyes and ears turn straight to the stage, straight to the story being uttered into their bones.

There is a voice, singing like it is the last sound you’ll ever here before you die and float away into heaven or hell. That guttural silver flame of melody and ecstasy is shooting from the throat of a man who is so deep inside the music that he does not exist any longer.

That man is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. And after six years of listing to him and after four concerts that healed the **** out of me, I finally got to say “hello” to the man.

* Added words “and into the present” postfacto. All else is the real deal.

…said the heathen.
jeff buckley
more forthcoming? maybe not .boredome setting in.