Night Song (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan album)

Night Song is a joint album of the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the Canadian musician Michael Brook, recorded in 1995 at Real World Studios in Wiltshire and released on 20 February 1996 by Real World Records, the last album the label released in his lifetime. ^{1 2}

Having found on Mustt Mustt that Khan soared highest when given time to improvise, Brook chose a new method: Khan recorded improvisations, some an hour long, onto multitrack tape, and Brook chose the best sections and built each track part by part, with no structure to aim for, a manual process that predated easy digital editing; Sound on Sound called it a "technological nightmare". ¹ Musicians from Baaba Maal's Senegalese band took part, among them the kora player Kauwding Cissokho, with Dildar Hussain on tabla and Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan on harmonium. ¹

The album joins qawwali vocals to Brook's electronic ambient music and is often counted Khan's most experimental; the two wrote the songs together, with lyrics about relationships and "spiritual cleanliness", and Consumable Online wrote that they make a pronounced effort to lead the listener towards pure spiritual ecstasy. ¹

It reached number 4 on Billboard's world albums chart and 65 on the UK Albums Chart, Mojo ranked it 21st among the albums of 1996, and it was nominated for the Grammy for Best World Music Album at the 39th ceremony in 1997, which went to the Chieftains' Santiago. ¹ Five of its tracks were remixed on Star Rise in 1997, and the label reissued it on 4 May 2015. ¹

• English Wikipedia, 'Night Song (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan album)', revision 1375773464 of 20 September 2026. ¹
• Wikidata item Q17012470. ²