Qawwali is a strain of Sufi devotional music that stretches back centuries, but the sound we know—even if many listeners couldn’t identify the genre name—is a soaring modern iteration marked by driving handclaps, pulsing harmoniums, percolating tabla, and some of the most acrobatic call-and-response singing on Earth. There have been a number of brilliant practitioners of this form, including the Sabri Brothers, Abida Parveen, and Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali Group, but no single artist transformed the genre and introduced it to a global audience like Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who died tragically in 1997, age 48, as his popularity continued to climb. Qawwali, like many musical forms on the Indian subcontinent, is a family tradition, and Nusrat was no exception, taking the reins of his own clan’s group when he was just 23. Over time he accelerated the music’s tempo and brought razor-sharp concision to the group’s performances.

Already a massive star in his homeland, in the 1980s Ali Khan began to expand the music’s reach by performing abroad, including a galvanic 1985 performance in England at Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD Festival that cracked open the west for qawwali music. A few years later he began making records for Gabriel’s Real World label, attracting new audiences and admirers, including Mick Jagger, Jeff Buckley, and Bollywood composer A.R. Rahman. The singer embraced experimentation, growing more comfortable using the recording studio as a tool, working with electronics, and collaborating with rock stars like Gabriel and Eddie Vedder (albeit with mixed results). But his traditional core never wavered, and time has made it clear that his own unalloyed work remains unmatched, a fact vividly reinforced by the glorious discovery of the music on the newly released Chain of Light, a session from 1990 that captures Ali Khan at his best.

The high-energy music is fueled by explosive interplay with the group, as a forceful chorus responds to the leader’s soaring leads, delivering devotional poetry with intense fervor. Ali Khan was a peerless improviser, breathlessly extrapolating the ornate melodies with his staggering range, elastic phrasing, and agile instrument, making religious ecstasy palpable and deeply soulful. The album features four traditional qawwali songs, all of which build a staggering head of steam, usually starting with ambling grooves in which the melody is defined, the harmonium lines casting a serenely tuneful atmosphere before the tabla and handclap rhythms toggle into a fast-paced lope. But it’s the voices of the group that really inject the weightless energy. Ali Khan sings the lead, and the chorus answers his spiraling phrases with a mixture of earthy chants and wildly virtuosic solo asides that sprout organically from the core melody, like the sudden appearance of a shooting star, hitting hard before flaming out almost as quickly as it emerged. Chain of Light is both an unanticipated gift from a brilliant artist at the peak of his powers and a bracing reminder of his unique genius.