Night Song is a collaborative studio album by Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Canadian ambient musician, guitarist and producer Michael Brook. Recorded in 1995 and released in 1996 on Real World Records, it was Khan's last album released on the label during his lifetime. Khan and Brook had previously collaborated for Mustt Mustt (1990), a critically acclaimed world fusion album said to have led Pakistani youth to discover Sufi religious music. The two had not worked for some time but collaborated again for a new album in 1995, naming the album Night Song. The album was produced by Brook, who developed an innovative but difficult production process for the album. Khan recorded improvisations for the album, and Brook had to decide which sections, some of which were an hour long, were the best and how they were going to fit together, without having a structural point of reference to start with or aim towards. He had components recorded on multi-track tapes, and created each track part by part, overdubbing his instrumentation atop of it, a manual process that predated easy forms of digital editing.
The album is considered a world fusion album, combining Khan's qawwali vocals with Brook's ambient production, and is often considered to be one of Khan's most experimental albums, featuring contributions from Senegalese and classically trained musicians. The songs on the album were written collaboratively between the duo. The album contains down-to-earth lyrics about relationships and spiritual cleanliness, although Consumable Online noted that, despite this, “the two artists make an obvious, pronounced effort to lead one down a path of pure spiritual ecstasy.” Upon its February 1996, it charted at number 4 on the Billboard Top World Music Albums chart and number 65 on the UK Album Chart, and was critically acclaimed, with one review declaring it “a most intoxicating spiritually uplifting cross-cultural expression,” and another calling it "elegant and entrancing." The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album in 1997, but lost out to The Chieftains’ album Santiago. Several months earlier, Mojo had named it the 21st best album of 1996 in their year-end “Albums of the Year” list. Songs from this album and Mustt Mustt were remixed for the pair's dubtronica-orientated remix album Star Rise, released in 1997.
Background
In 1989, English rock and world musician Peter Gabriel suggested to qawwali star Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and ambient musician and guitarist Michael Brook that they record a collaborative album together for Gabriel's recently established world music label Real World Records. The duo subsequently recorded Mustt Mustt (1990), a world fusion album credited only to Khan that features Khan's qawwali vocals with keyboard work from Brook. Considered a "secularized" or "Western" version of Khan's other Qawwali albums, it was critically acclaimed internationally and has been credited with leading Pakistani youth to discover Sufi religious music, qawwali. It was subsequently named one of the Top 100 albums of the 1990s by American music magazine Alternative Press, and reached number 14 on the Billboard Top World Music Albums chart in 1991. David Lynch of The Austin Chronicle called the album a "seminal fusion". British musician Nitin Sawhney said that it "changed the face of British music forever".
The album was originally intended to be a one-off collaboration, and the pair subsequently worked on separate projects. Khan released a string of over ten more traditional solo albums, including The Day, the Night, the Dawn, the Dusk (1991), the unanimously acclaimed Devotional Songs (1992) and The Last Prophet (1994), the latter two albums also released on Real World Records. Brook, meanwhile, released the acclaimed Cobalt Blue (1992) on 4AD Records, and toured with Robert Fripp in 1993, resulting in the release of the tour's live album Damage: Live in 1994 on Virgin Records. However, Khan and Brook chose to reunite in 1994 for another album for Real World Records. Naming the album Night Song, work began in 1994. Part of the album was reportedly recorded in Real World's Real World Studios in Box, Wiltshire.