Mustt Mustt

Mustt Mustt was not planned as a record. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan had spent an exhausting night at Real World Studios recording vocals for the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, and when the session finally wound down, Peter Gabriel, who ran the studio, suggested he try improvising something with the Western instruments sitting idle around him. Nusrat sat at a harmonium and played a simple scale, almost offhand, the kind of warm-up a qawwal might run through before a real performance began.

That fragment became the foundation of the track. Gabriel called in producer Michael Brook along with musicians Darryl Johnson, James Pinker and Guo Yue to build a full arrangement around Nusrat's voice and the scale he had played, setting his qawwali vocal technique inside a contemporary, electronically inflected production rather than the traditional harmonium-and-tabla ensemble a qawwali performance ordinarily uses. The title, Mustt Mustt, takes its word from the Sufi devotional vocabulary Nusrat had built his whole career on: mustt describes a state of ecstatic intoxication in love of God, the same term at the heart of the older, traditional qawwali sung in honor of the Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar.

Released November 12, 1990, the track carried that borrowed vocabulary into an audience that had never encountered qawwali at all, an audience the traditional devotional gathering the music comes from was never built to address.

Mustt Mustt found its widest audience through a remix nobody involved in making it had planned for. In 1991, the Bristol group Massive Attack, then working on their own debut album, reworked the title track into what became known as the Duckpond Dub Mix, laying their own dub and trip-hop production underneath Nusrat's unaltered vocal. The result became a club hit across the United Kingdom and the first song in the Urdu language ever to reach the British singles charts, a genuine crossover in an industry that had rarely made room for South Asian devotional music in any form.

The commercial numbers that followed were unusual for a record built around Sufi devotional vocals rather than pop songwriting: more than 600,000 copies sold outside Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent, and eventual use in a Coca-Cola television advertisement, about as far from a devotional gathering as a piece of music can travel. Critic Nitin Sawhney later credited the record with changing the face of British music, and Nusrat himself, who had built his reputation performing hours-long traditional qawwali sessions at Sufi shrines and concert halls across the subcontinent, described his approach to the crossover work plainly: "I made my own style. We update qawwali with the times."

That update came at a real cost worth naming honestly: the traditional ensemble format, the shrine setting, and the participatory devotional context of qawwali as it is actually practiced are largely absent from Mustt Mustt, replaced by a studio arrangement built for an audience encountering the tradition's vocabulary for the first time.