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FAÍZ ALI FAÍZ | lead singer; KARAMAT ALI ASAD | harmonium, vocals; KASHIF ALI | harmonium, vocals; RIZWAN ALI | tabla; FAYAZ HUSSAIN | background vocals; SHAHID NADEEM | background vocals; MUHAMMAD ARSHAD |background vocals; THIERRY ROBIN | buzuq, robab, guitar; PASCAL STALIN | gumbass; JOSE LUIS DO NASCIMENTO | percussion; FRANCIS VARIS | accordion This encounter takes us across an especially high number of national borders: nine or eleven states lie on the way from the Pakistani state of Punjab to the French department of Maine-Et-Loire, depending on whether one chooses the route across the Balkan or through Northern Africa. It was also along these two routes that the Roma migration took place — a kind of a life’s journey for the non-Roma Thierry “Titi” Robin, the sensitive virtuoso who has caused a couple of sensations with his border-crossing projects since the 1990s. Robin’s engagement with the qawwali, the ecstatic music from the Sufi culture, is his first step out of the already quite broad Roma music repertoire. To do so, Robin has found a partner in nobody less than the reigning king of qawwali: Faíz Ali Faíz is one of the most talented and dignified successors of qawwali legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who died in 1997. Nusrat brought qawwali onto the world’s concert stages, and Faíz is ready to enter a dialogue with other musical styles — an unusual step from this somewhat hermetic, seclusive art form. Both artists have appeared at Glatt & Verkehrt before, but in this joint project they perform a completely new program.

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