Sufi Spirit

You may be forgiven for approaching this with trepidation: a Danish rock‘n’roll band playing along with qawwali (the sacred music of South Asian Sufis) may not sound like your cup of tea. But Rocqawali have been delighting audiences in Denmark and Pakistan – the latter, perhaps, because their vocalist is Ejaz Sher Ali, descended from one of the greatest qawwali families of Pakistan.
The heart of qawwali lies in its song texts, consisting of mystical poetry that can be sung in a number of styles as long as the vocals are delivered with sincerity in keeping with the spirit of love and peace. Ejaz Sher Ali's performance is flawless and one that embodies all aspects of a highly trained singer: his quiet-ish ghazal (rhyming couplets) numbers are just as entrancing as the traditional high-voltage qawwali ones. He is accompanied by the Danish Iranian Tin Soheili and the Danish Pakistani Jonas Stampe, both of whom lay a pretty sturdy guitar foundation against which percussionist Stephen Grabowski plays rhythmic patterns drawn from Western, Indian and Ethiopian traditions. The results are a highly appealing, if somewhat modern, form of qawwali.