Real World
Rizwan Muazzam Qawwali - At the Feet Of The Beloved
Rizwan Muazzam Qawwali - At the Feet Of The Beloved
Regular price
£26.00
Regular price
Sale price
£26.00
Unit price
per
Tax included.
Couldn't load pickup availability
Preorder due for release 14th March
The rich tapestry of Qawwali is often a family affair.
Many of the great qawwals — singers of devotional Qawwali music — have come from hefty lineages of musicians, and built their groups, known as parties, out of the connective dynastic tissues of siblings and family members. In much of the music you can hear some sense of this; the way the collective melodies and harmonies seem to reach beyond planes of past, present and future, somehow holding roots and heritages along with a distant, different realm, all in one hand.
Such is the case with the exquisite Pakistani brothers Rizwan and Muazzam Ali Khan, and their latest body of work, At the Feet of the Beloved. The siblings come from a veritable Qawwali dynasty comprising some 600 years of qawwals; not least, their uncle, the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (NFAK), widely considered as the ‘Shahenshah-e-Qawwali’ — the King of Qawwali. Taught by Rizwan and Muazzam’s grandfather, NFAK’s work and his exceptional voice helped bring Qawwali to a global audience, spreading the Sufi Islamic form’s message of spiritual love and longing to connect with a divine, higher power, regardless of any perceived barriers of culture, language, religion or ethnicity. It is this sentiment which the duo, along with their party of seven other musicians providing secondary vocals, instrumentation and percussion, seek to continue, carrying the torch and opening up people worldwide to that sublime, uplifting power.
The brothers are back with a new record that teems with all the love and transcendent longing one associates with Qawwali — but, in a way which the pair seem set on making their own. As Rashid Din puts it: “There hasn’t been anybody who actually has led the legacy in this manner of working in the footsteps of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — even from his family, these are the only two brothers who are actually trying to follow the footsteps of their late uncle. And even within Pakistan, there are many Qawwali singers doing a good job, but Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s family tradition of Qawwali is a very popular one; nobody is doing anything new, they’re just repeating and copying Nusrat songs. So we felt the need to give new material as Nusrat is not with us anymore. These two brothers are doing a great job with the new lyrics and new compositions, trying to take Nusrat’s message further.”
And so it is on At the Feet of the Beloved that we find a collection of four beautiful songs; two in Urdu and two in Punjabi; among the latter, one song has never been recorded before, and finds original composition from the two brothers. Recorded in their home studio in Pakistan, these are, at their core, songs about seeking love and peace, of course; but Rashid suggests the interpretation is ultimately down to the beholder. “We call them their love songs, but there is a spirituality in there. But it’s contemporary, too; it can be applied either way, spiritually or materialistically. It depends on where an individual’s love is — whether it’s spiritual or non-spiritual.”
