Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali

There is a real scent of all-male, Indo-Islamic, religious aristocracy to the two 19 and 20-year-old guys who head up this remarkable…

There is a real scent of all-male, Indo-Islamic, religious aristocracy to the two 19 and 20-year-old guys who head up this remarkable, 10-strong, Pakistani Qawwali choir. The pair are brothers, and nephews of the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Mounted on a dais, the group sits cross-legged in a deafening huddle, quickly committing themselves to propulsive, heady, 15-minute sequences of mantrariffs, many built around religious texts.

Riswan Ali Khan is the perfumed-looking centrepiece, his soaring enunciations often punctuated at the back of his throat, while Muazzam tends towards rapid tongue-teeth rhythms or full-on blistering high-pitched roars, working himself up into great flourishes of self-immolating slap-karate.

The building blocks of the music are relatively simple, but very interesting internal rhythms emerge between the buoyant tablas and dholaks, the constant flog of the handclaps, and the whinge-and-blast of the two harmoniums.

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Meanwhile, constantly raga-thrashing and weaving upwards in praise of Allah and Muhammad, Riswan and Muazzam's voices arch over the constant reprises of the choir, occasionally topped by three other guys who inject the odd wailing high flattened second, sixth or indeed minor third - pained yowls from the human wilderness.

Qawwali is a strange hybrid, the Arabic-style singing stemming from 10th-century Sufism, the Iranian Islamic sect; blended with the strongly Hindi-accented choruses, tablas and harmoniums, never mind the Krishnaesque twisting hand-gestures. And somewhere in among all that sacred jazz, one harmonium player produced some very contemporary-sounding slam-rhythms.

The fearful abjectness of the exalted mystical texts make this essentially a devotional music, so in exhibiting itself on Western stages, Qawwali has come a long way from its origins - for all the respectful closure of the bar in Vicar Street's performance room. As to the culture behind it, there was little enlightenment from Muazzam's humourless, muttered introductions, leaving you highly bemused, but buzzed to bits by the mad, ecstatic force of the music.