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Manzoor Ahmad Khan Niazi

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Ustad Manzoor Ahmed Khan Niazi has passed away today. He was 98. He was, both age-wise and stature-wise the senior-most Qawwal in the Indo-Pak Subcontinent. He had one of the most instantly recognizable and absolutely, mellifluously endearing voices in all of Qawwali. He was the leader of the most phenomenally gifted, albeit short-lived Qawwali group of the last century, a Supergroup which included his cousins Munshi Raziuddin Khan. Ustad Bahauddin Khan and Iftekhar Ahmed Nizami, and whose surviving recordings seem to date from a time and place that's almost too phenomenally wonderful that merely listening to them sometimes feels like an act of desecration. His last recordings, from when he was 90 years old, still carried the same verve, the same 'taazgi' as his recordings from the '60s His was the voice that first sang Maulana Jami's "Naseema" and Nawab Hilm's "Yaad Hai Kuch Bhi Hamaari Kanhaiyya" to me, and even today I can scarcely appreciate these two canonical Qawwali kalaams in any other Qawwal's voice. With Niazi Sb's passing closes the chapter of the Golden Age of Pakistani Qawwali. He was a predecessor of, and later a contemporary of Nusrat, The Sabri Brothers, Aziz Mian Qawwal, Bakhshi Salamat Qawwal, Aziz Ahmed Warsi, Jafar Hussayn Khan Badayuni and ALL the Qawwals of the latter three quarters of the twentieth century. He survived them all well into the twenty-first century before finally returning to his Maker

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