Nusrat

Very remiss of me not to have mentioned the tenth anniversary of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's death the other day.

Tim Buckley called him ‘my Elvis’, and when I read Cioran on the Sufi mystics in Tears and Saints I always think of Nursat.

This is three clips spliced together, which is a bit frustrating, but then again it’s almost impossible to listen to Nusrat except in extenso. You can’t just parachute down on the summit of one of his qawwali routines without the ten or even twenty minute slog to the summit first.

It’s also hard to know where to recommend a beginner should start, since there are so many Nusrat albums (hundreds of them). The Peter Gabriel-produced ones, I suppose, since they certainly did the trick for me.

Most of what I post on this blog is little better than an acid bath in my spleen, but before something like this even my inner Diogenes is prepared to take the afternoon off.