Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Shahbaaz

Album of the Week, August 8, 2026 If you’ve just done a big crossover album, as an artist you have an implicit choice: do you continue mining that vein, coming closer and closer to pop? Or do you return to the music that made you famous? Following the success of Mustt Mustt, one imagines this was a choice facing Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at some point. After all, the album, and his appearances at WOMAD and other Western festivals, were gaining him increasing fame. But his choice was to double down on the traditional repertoire that had been his life, and he released Shahbaaz, an album with four tracks of traditional qawwali music that, as the liner notes by Pervais Khan observe, take us “on a quest to find new and even more daring paths to the sublime.” The album, as before recorded in Real World’s Big Room, features many of the members of Nusrat’s party, including his brother Farrukh, long-time tabla player Dildar Hussein, and his young student Rahat Ali, who once again both participates…