Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's family were qawwals of Jalandhar in a lineage running back several centuries. They moved to Lyallpur, now Faisalabad, in 1947. He was born there in 1948.
He took over the family party in 1971 and became the most widely heard qawwali singer in history. His voice had extraordinary range and stamina and he improvised at length inside a form that permits it.
He recorded for Peter Gabriel's Real World label from 1989, worked on Hollywood soundtracks, and was sampled and reworked by musicians who did not understand a word of what he was singing.
The texts he sang were Punjabi, Persian and Urdu Sufi poetry: Bulleh Shah, Amir Khusrau, Baba Farid Ji.
He died in London in 1997 at forty-eight. A Punjabi devotional form, sung by a family from Jalandhar, became one of the most recognisable sounds in world music inside a decade.
Qawwali is sung by a party: a lead voice, a second, a clapping chorus, harmonium and tabla. The form is devotional and is performed at shrines, and the party's discipline is what made his improvisation possible.
His family's line runs back through generations of qawwals in the Punjab, and the move to Faisalabad in 1947 broke the association with Jalandhar.
The international recordings and the film work put the form in front of audiences who did not know the language, and Punjabi and Urdu Sufi texts reached them without translation.