With the rise of music streaming services like Spotify in the last decade, audiences have access to music from all corners of the globe literally at their fingertips, 24/7.

Artists like K'naan, from Somalia, and Stromae, from Belgium (and is half Rwandan) have blurred the lines that distinguish Eastern and Western beats from one another. The landscape of world music has changed considerably in the last 30 years.

The Grammy Awards change world music category due to 'connotations of colonialism'.(In November 2020, the Grammys officially changed the world music album category to best global music album.) Considered the more experimental of the two albums, Night Song, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, was nominated for best world music album at the 39th annual Grammy Awards, but lost out to the traditional Irish band the Chieftains. Night Song was Khan's last studio album before his untimely death the following year. So he thought I might be an appropriate producer and collaborator for Nusrat, and he asked me to get involved and we recorded it in his studio in Bath, England.' 'Peter Gabriel,' Brook recalls, 'who was in charge of Real World Records, had heard my solo album that had some Asian influences in it, but was still kind of a modern, studio-type recording. He came across Khan's work in the late '80s through his dealings with British record label Real World Records. He was a celebrated artist throughout South Asia and came from a family that had practised the tradition of qawwali for almost 600 years.īrook, who hails from Toronto, is a guitarist and producer who has delved into various musical genres, from experimental to world music, over his long and illustrious career. Considered one of the greatest Sufi singers in the Urdu language, Khan was often called 'Shahenshah-e-Qawwali' - the King of Kings of Qawwali - in his native Pakistan. In the wake of this new era of global music, the Grammy Award for best world music album was established in 1992.īrook and Khan, two artists from opposite ends of the world, came together in the English countryside to blend together the sounds of traditional Eastern folk singing with new-age Western electronica, a collaboration that propelled Khan to international superstardom, introducing a whole generation to qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis. The '90s were a time of great musical exploration, with artists in the West increasingly pulling more multicultural influences into their music and experimenting with vast musical lineages.

Qawali nusrat fateh ali khan