Hello! I am switching to publishing on Friday instead of Sunday. And I am only talking about one thing instead of three today, since two – let alone three – would have made this NL longer than The Iliad. I might send the other two in one week instead of two weeks but TBD.
(Random anecdote: Years ago, fresh from making my New Year’s resolutions, I decided to take a 7am-on-Saturday class at my gym titled TBD, figuring they just didn’t know what the class would be yet. I showed up and it was actually TBC, Total Body Conditioning, which involved leaving the gym, going to McCarren Park, and doing a gruelling obstacle coarse in the rain. Worst of all they made us work in teams of two and my partner, a class regular, was LIVID, legit foaming at the mouth, about how I took 4x the amount of time run a lap. Anyway, Happy New Year / Mars entering Capricorn (a good thing for NY resolutions).
Jeff Buckley, Live at Sin-é, New York
Intellectually, I’ve always known Jeff Buckey’s music is masterful. But I did not connect with it emotionally. I tried, but couldn’t. Until – until – I came across this live recording of him covering Yeh Jo Halka Saroor Hae by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
Jeff Buckley hero-worshipped Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, whom he called ‘his Elvis’. (‘Part Buddha, part demon, part mad angel... his voice is velvet fire,’ JB said.) Growing up in India, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was, arguably, my Elvis too. His music was everywhere – not just his songs, but his influence. Bollywood music directors copied his songs relentlessly, and even with the added bells and whistles, it retained a certain transcendental quality.
To illustrate: Once I was in an airport in Oaxaca, and a random tune popped into my head, completely unprompted. I knew it was a Bollywood song, but I had no way of finding out exactly which one – it wasn’t lyrics I remembered, and I am way to embarrassed (and tuneless) to hum it aloud to anyone who would be able to identify it. I also knew it wasn’t the chorus of a song, which made it more difficult. This bothered me enough that I had to sit down and put my head on my knees, as if I was nauseous. This song had clearly meant a lot to me at some point in my life but now all I remembered was a shred. I was reminded of how far I was from home, though India is hardly home; and New York, the place I was returning to, didn’t feel that way either, though I’d lived in or around for 16 years and wasn’t sure where else I could go. I just had to accept that the song’s name would find me, rather than the other way around – a small leap of faith in the universe. Four years later, in London, it did. And what do you know: a total Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan rip-off.
Since realising his connection to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jeff Buckley’s music sounds transcendental to me too; more like prayers than songs. Here’s an excerpt from Jeff Buckley’s liner notes to the ‘Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's The Supreme Collection Vol. 1’ album (Mojo Pin), which describes the Sufi mystic tradition NFAK’s qawwali music comes from:
‘In between the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit is the void. The Qawwali is the messenger who leaps empty-handed into the abyss and returns carrying messages of love from the Beloved (Allah). These messages have no words, per se, but… they come in bursts of light into the hearts and minds of the members of the audience… This is called Marifat, the inner knowledge, and it is in the aim of the Qawwali tradition to bring the listener into this state: first through the beauty of the poetry and the weight of its meaning; then, eventually, through the Qawwali's use of repetition; repeating the key phrases of the poem until the meaning has melted away to reveal the true form to the listener. I've seen Nusrat and his party repeatedly melt New Yorkers into human beings.’
If you’re in the mood to be melted into a human being, listen to the full album of Jeff Buckley’s live recordings at Sin-é, a cafe in New York’s St. Mark’s Place.
Besides the music being hauntingly beautiful, my favourite part is how normal, and sometimes kind of annoying, Jeff Buckey’s speaking voice sounds in between songs. I think because Jeff Buckley died so young he carries an air of perfection, but he was just a real guy living in the 90s, making vaguely misogynistic jokes and breaking out the Smells Like Teen Spirit power chords without any prompting. You just know it was the song of the moment back then because of the way the audience responds.
Sin-é closed more than a decade ago, and is now a bar serving cocktails with names like ‘Cuffing Season’. Which, fine. That’s life. But a commemorative plaque would be nice!!