In 2005, Khan posthumously received the "Legends" award at the UK Asian Music Awards. As of 2001, he held the Guinness World Record for the "Most Qawwali Recordings", having recorded over 125 Qawwali albums before his death. In 1997, he was nominated for two Grammy Awards, for Best Traditional Folk Album and Best World Music Album. In 1987, he received the President of Pakistan's Award for Pride of Performance for his contribution to Pakistani music. He is widely considered to be the most important Qawwal in history. By surveying the forms of listening that are structurally provided by the textual discourse, semiotics investigates the destiny of the musical and religious meanings of Qawwali in relation to the process of intercultural translation. In this way, semiotics offers an analytical standpoint alternative to the postmodernist approach to postmodern cultural phenomena. In order to discern the conditions of significance, semiotics reconstructs the relation between text and context of interpretation on the ground of structural pertinences. Nusrat's life and his artistic vicissitudes show the postmodern destiny of Qawwali as a religious kind of music that apparently went through a process of desacralization and profanation as a result of multiple interpretations by different audiences. It also travelled through time, transforming the traditional style of the ancient chanted poetry into new forms of musical expression. Inspired by mystic spirituality, Nusrat's music travelled through the East and the West, absorbing some of the features of the musical cultures with which it came in contact. This Muslim devotional music, which is prominent in South Asia, has been developed since the fourteenth century by the Sufi circles of the Chishti brotherhood in order to preach and communicate the teachings of the saints. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a foremost singer of Qawwali. He started his career by singing at the age of 13, after the death of his father in 1964, Qawwal extraordinaire Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan has never had to look back. He is prevalently branded as “Shahenshah-e-Qawwali”, signifying “The King of Kings of Qawwali”. Amplifying the 600-year old Qawwali convention of his family, Khan is generally attributed with acquainting Qawwali music with worldwide groups of onlookers. Khan's musical legacy is now carried forward by his nephews, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan and Rizwan-Muazzam.īefore his untimely demise, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan gave the world a number of soulful compositions that have since became timeless.Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a Pakistani legend Qawwal and a musician, the reverential music of the Sufis. His body was repatriated to Faisalabad, and his funeral was a public affair. He died of a sudden cardiac arrest at Cromwell Hospital on August 16, aged 48. In August of 1997, Khan traveled to London to treat liver and kidney problems, he was rushed from the airport to Cromwell Hospital in London. That same year, his album Night Song was also nominated for a Grammy Award for Best World Music Album. Khan's album Intoxicated Spirit was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album in 1997. In 2002, Gabriel included Khan's vocals on the posthumously released track "Signal to Noise" on his album Up. Alanis Morissette was brought in to sing with his unfinished vocals. Khan also provided vocals for The Prayer Cycle, which was put together by Jonathan Elias, but died before the tracks could be completed. One of the most noteworthy of these collaborations came in 1995, when Khan grouped with Eddie Vedder on two songs for the soundtrack to Dead Man Walking. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's experimental collaborations with the Canadian guitarist Michael Brook, spurred on several further collaborations with a number of other Western composers and rock musicians. He would go on to release five albums of traditional Qawwali through Real World, along with the more experimental albums Mustt Mustt (1990), Night Song (1996), and the posthumous remix album Star Rise (1997). In 1988, Khan teamed up with Peter Gabriel on the soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ, which led to Khan being signed to Gabriel's Real World label.