Dub Qawwali

There is always something a bit macabre in creating a collaboration with a musician who has been dead for a decade. This kind of thing is nothing new, of course. The dead are sampled daily--from Nina Simone to Elvis Presley and, most recently, Billie Holiday. But this kind of reconstructive homage reeks of easy rtunism. Nusrat eh Ali Khan was the Ravi Shankar, Jimi Hendrix, and John Coltrane of Qawwali singing, the sacred and ancient vocal style popularized in Pakistan and brought to the world by Nusrat in the 1990s. Nusrat himself wasn't averse to cross-cultural collaboration, having cut three albums with producer Michael Brook--two of them expansive, impressionistic world-fusion works. But Nusrat was sensitive to how his music was employed, even chastising Brook on their first album, Mustt Musstt, when Brook resequenced the singer's vocal tracks for musical, but not necessarily literal, effect. They worked out their differences on the masterful Night Song. But Nusrat had no input on these tracks, which he reportedly cut between 1968 and 1974, very early in his career. Dub-electronica artist Gaudi takes the Pakistani's vocals and adds his own reggae and dub backing tracks to them. While Nusrat could send you into a trance state with his upwardly spiraling, almost heavy-metal grooves, Gaudi takes a lighter approach, turning the Qawwali hymns into reggae toasting that subverts much of the original intent. From the lyrical pop drift of "Kahin Mot Se Bhi Na Jao" to the vaguely hypnotic "Dil Da Rog Muka Ja Mahi," with its sampled sequence from Kraftwerk's "The Model," Gaudi chooses the attractive surface over the deeper journey that Nusrat eh Ali Khan conjured almost every time he sang. --John Diliberto

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