ekaal Hasan is far from complacent. His discography seamlessly blends Eastern and Western musical styles. He was producing entire records for mainstream pop artists long before corporate shows dominated the country’s music scene. Our conversations revealed a deep-seated concern: the absence of a comprehensive archive for legendary figures like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and other artists of this land. While I pondered solutions to this issue, Hasan had already initiated the creation of a Pakistani archive encompassing music, art, philosophy, and poetry, in collaboration with the Aga Khan Museum. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan will be the first artist, but if I know Mekaal Hasan (and I do for nearly two decades), this is just the beginning.

Instep: What prompted to you to take on such a massive undertaking, which is – culling songs from Night Song as a tribute to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, presented by Mekaal Hasan Band, in collaboration with the Aga Khan Museum?

Mekaal Hasan: I had a residency project in 2023 with the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, which was a concert performance featuring Canad-ian artists playing traditional classical music from the subcontinent.

The Aga Khan Museum is home to brilliant Islamic art, and you can experience a breadth of Islamic culture on any given day there via its exhibitions. There’s a long standing one on Rumi.

You can also enjoy many unique musical performances at their superb indoor auditorium. Inspired by what I saw around me, I expressed my desire to present Nusrat Sb’s (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) music. This was a start to creating projects with the Aga Khan Museum.

These projects would feature different aspects of Pakistani traditional music and art. The features could be musical performances or art installations.

The director of the museum, Mr. Amirali Alibhai, was very open to the idea of us starting and building a Pak-istani archive. This would allow people from all over to experience some wonderful musical, spiritual and philoso-phical ideas that Pakistan’s finest minds have created.

Night Song (1996) was Nusrat Sb’s last Real World release and was produced by Canadian producer Michael Brook. With that connection in mind, I set about putting together a documentary and performance project on Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali.

A host of Canadian artists along with a Pakistani Qawwali contingent, will perform Night Song in its entirety as a live tribute to Nusrat Sb, who, in my opinion, really put Pakistan on the world stage some five decades ago. He was a figure whose music had so much to offer that Canadian artists could learn from him and get to explore with us.

What you can look forward to is a very personalised documentary feature that examines Nusrat Sb’s impact on the music world. In terms of........

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