"Part Buddha, part demon, part mad angel... his [Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's] voice is like velvet fire, simply incomparable."

— Jeff Buckley, Liner Notes for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's 'The Supreme Collection, Volume 1', New York, 1996

The prodigious American musician Jeff Buckley was 24 years old when he first heard the voice of Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan — perhaps the greatest qawwali singer of all time. It was 1990, and Buckley was living in Harlem, New York, with a friend at the time. In his own words:

"My roommate and I stood there, blasting it in his room. We were all awash in the thick undulating tide of dark punjabi tabla rhythms, spiked with synchronized handclaps booming from above and below in hard, perfect time."

It was the beginning of Buckley's life-long admiration for the Pakistani maestro he called his Elvis and Qawwali — the devotional music of the Sufi mystics that, accordingly to Buckley, Khan "single-handedly transformed (...) from a static antique into a brilliant explosion of light". A lapsed Catholic, Buckley was so enamoured by the beauty and grace of Qawwali that he learnt Urdu so he could understand, and even sing Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's music. During his brief life, Buckley collected over 400 cassettes of Qawwali music and covered Khan's songs during his live performances at Sin-é — a small café in Manhattan's East Village that launched the career of several poets and musicians like Sinéad O'Connor, Lana Del Rey (as Lizzy Grant), and Allen Ginsberg in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In 1993, during one of these live performances, Buckley spoke at length about his admiration for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and famously sang 'Ye Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hain' — one of Khan's best-known songs, which also happened to be the first Qawwali that Buckley had ever heard.

In 1996, Buckley finally got a chance to meet Khan when Interview Magazine asked him to speak to the legendary Pakistani Qawwal. During the interview, Buckley told Khan how 'Ye Jo Halka Halka...' saved his life, and the two talked at length about their lives and musical influences.

"Through his ecstatic performances, Khan’s Qawwali acts as a living testament to music’s power to link all humans, unashamed of emotion, to the divine," Buckley wrote in his introduction to the interview. "At once soaring and penetrating, these sounds seem to rip open the sky, slowly revealing the radiant face of the beloved. Qawwals don’t sing, they are born to sing, and the men who accompany Khan in his ensemble do not just play music, they become music itself."

Sadly, their brief, unlikely bond — which transcended the barriers of both space and language and connected these two great men through music — was cut short by Buckley's untimely death from a swimming accident on May 29, 1997, at the age of 30. Khan, too, passed away from a sudden cardiac arrest on August 16 the same year. He was 48 years old at the time of his death. 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of Jeff Buckley's only studio album 'Grace', as well as the discovery of a lost album — titled 'Chain of Light' — by Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Read Jeff Buckley's interview with Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan here.

Listen to Jeff Buckley talk about his admiration for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's music and sing 'Ye Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hain' during one of his live performances at Sin-é in 1993:

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