ISLAMABAD: US magazine Rolling Stone, which focuses on music, politics and popular culture, has featured Pakistani qawwali maestro on its list of “The 200 Greatest Singers of All Time,” who it said had shaped “history and defined our lives.”
The list, which was published on January 1, celebrates the “deep, empathetic bond” between artist and listener that is the “most elemental connection” in music, according to the magazine.
Born in 1948, Khan was a Pakistani vocalist, musician and music director, primarily a singer of qawwali — a form of Sufi devotional music. He was widely regarded as the greatest sufi singer in the Urdu language and often referred to as the “Shahenshah-e-Qawwali.”
“Watching archival performances of the late Pakistani vocal master Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — an icon in the realm of Qawwali, a type of Sufi devotional song, whose family’s musical legacy stretched back hundreds of years — it’s easy to lose track of time, and to hear how his music easily reached global audiences in the Eighties when he began performing abroad and recording for Peter Gabriel’s Real World label,” the magazine wrote.
Among Khan’s famous fans were Madonna, Eddie Vedder, who duetted with him on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack, and Jeff Buckley, who called the qawwali maestro “my Elvis” and studied Urdu in order to properly cover him.
This list, compiled by Rolling Stone staff and contributors, encompasses 100 years of pop music as an ongoing global conversation, where iconic Indian playback singer Lata Mangeshkar lands between Amy Winehouse and Johnny Cash, and salsa queen Celia Cruz is up there in the rankings with Prince and Marvin Gaye.
