Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Back in the 1990s heyday of the bootleg CD, the market stalls of Camden Town and Glastonbury were laden with “trance remixes” of the Pink Floyd catalogue, inaccurately credited with a nudge-and-a-wink to The Orb. The albums were interpolated with snatches of other records, and Floyd fans, not generally noted for their eclectic musical taste, complained about most of these, particularly the remix of Animals. “Some samples of Middle Eastern music are interspersed throughout ‘Pigs’ but don’t work very well,” reads one online review. “Avoid this one.” Now, collaborating with the Canadian producer Michael Brook, he aimed to reach a wider audience with his qawwali — devotional songs that sounded like love songs, love songs that sounded devotional, propelled by harmonium and tabla and handclaps and Khan’s quicksilver voice. “Mustt Mustt” was an improvisation on a traditional text about the Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and through him the divine, written by the 13th-century poet Amir Khusrau, and sung in Urdu that was at times edited into unintelligibility by Brook. (The same sessions yielded the much more traditional album Chain of Light, only recently unearthed from Real World’s vaults.)Let us know your memories of ‘Mustt Mustt’ in the comments section belowThe paperback edition of ‘The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by ChambersMusic credits: Real World; Oriental Star/Universal; Kiran Ahluwalia; Isheeta Chakrvarty; Brook Martinez; Riverboat/World Music Network; Dhamma; Andante
