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'Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is the world's foremost expert of Qawwali, the devotional music form of Sufi Muslims. Nusrat is somewhere between a high priest and a rock god, capable of elevating entire audiences to a religious ecstasy even if they don't understand a word he's singing' - New York Magazine.

His collaborator guitarist Michael Brook describes the Ustad as 'pedal to the metal', meaning that his voice can rise to levels Western ears find incredible. For the Grammy nominated album, one filled with wobbling bass, infinite guitar and slow dub grooves, Brook created more space in the tracks and asked Nusrat to scale down his intensity so as to highlight his pitch and timing. "It was very much choreographing what he does," he says. "The way he toys with or flexes the rhythm. A great deal of his expressivity is in that. He'd do this incredibly fast scat singing thing which wasn't just an exercise in technique. The passion was there."

Brook knew the best way to capture this passion was to record lengthy takes and edit them down. The result is nothing short of stunning.

Ustad Nusrat Khan sings in a guttural mixture of Persian, Punjabi and Urdu. His nine-man backing troupe uses only their voices and two acoustic instruments, the tabla and harmonium. Each song is capable of lasting a half hour or more.

"My music is traditional religious music with no materialistic message," says the 48-year- old Ustad. "It attracts people because of its rhythm and the purity of its poetry."

"Nusrat has the god-given gift to reach all tonal ranges," says Rashid Ahmed, a family retainer who serves as his translator. "Although his training is classical, he has been taught to improvise from childhood."

Well, almost. His father, Usted Fateh Ali Khan, was a famous Qawwal who wanted his eldest son to be a doctor. "My father used to teach students and I listened," Nusrat once said. "One day I was caught listening and practising." He was nine years old at the time, a roly-poly child who was something of an embarrassment to his handsome and famous father.

The Ustad claims that he only decided to become a Qawwal after a recurring dream in which he saw himself singing at the shrine of Nazrat Khwaja Moin-ud-din Chisti at Ajmer, India. At first, he says, he dismissed the dream as absurd. No Qawwal had ever been allowed to sing inside the important Muslim shrine. But as the dream kept coming back, he decided that the sign was too important to ignore.

He joined the family troupe shortly after his father's death in 1964, but only became its leader in 1971 after his uncle, Mujahid Mubarak Ali Khan, became ill. While it took Nusrat a while to shake off his natural shyness, his extraordinary vocal abilities won quick attention. In 1973, he received the highest honour given to artistes by the Pakistan government and in 1979 he became the first Qawwal to be invited to sing at the Chisti shrine in Ajmer.

His international profile took a quantum leap in the late 1980s when he was approached by Peter Gabriel to sing on the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Gabriel, whose Real World label has since released five albums by the Ustad, was looking for a singer who could express the agony of Christ.

"I cherish the tradition of classical music more than my life," says the Ustad, "but as an experiment I do not mind the use of western musical instruments. I use Western instruments because I believe that you can dress up a pretty child in any clothes and it will still be pretty."

. In late 1992, Nusrat took up a brief teaching stint at a university in Seattle, Washington. When he returns to his home in Lahore later this year, he plans to set up a school for the next generation of Qawwals and, perhaps, to father a child to follow in his footsteps. Stern precepts handed down through centuries of Qawwals has ruled that his only child - a daughter aged 13 - may not aspire to that honour.

Such has been the attention centering on the Ustad’s unique gifts that pop star Joan Osborne has expressed her intention of going to Pakistan to take lessons from the legendary Qawwal.