Noor Mohammad Shah

Noor Mohammad Shah
Background information
Born	1961 (1961) Jammu and Kashmir, India
Genres	Sufi music
Occupation(s)	Musician songwriter
Instruments	Rabab
Years active	1980–present
Labels	Zee Music Company
Associated acts	Mohammad Muneer Nazir[1] Alif[2]
Musical career

Noor Mohammad Shah (Kashmiri: نور محمد شاہ, born in 1961) is a traditional Sufi music performer and songwriter, from Baki-Aker village in Handwara town of North Kashmir's Kupwara District (Kupwara district is sharing its border with Pakistan).^[3]

Background[]

Shah is a traditional Sufi music performer and songwriter and a virtuoso of the rabab. When a boy, in 1970, he was noticed for his talent with the idiophone-style Kashmiri percussion instrument of (clay pot) by the local singer Mohammad Yousuf Shah who then invited him to his troup for training and work. Having become a musician in his own right, for three decades Shah played and sang for the Sufi saint Ahad Sahib of Sopore (1930-2010),^[4] beginning at the turn of the 1980s^[5]

Career[]

In 2016, the posh Rawalpora (Colony) section of Srinagar (or the administrative capital of Jammu and Kashmir, a group of young men for whom he performed filmed Shah on a mobile phone and uploaded the video to the internet. The musician sang for them a famous elegy by a 16th-century Muslim poet and ascetic Habba Khatoon (who was also Empress Consort of the last Emperor of Kashmir).^[6] Without the humble and God-fearing musician's knowledge, this video went viral on the web and unexpectedly made him into a celebrity. Previously, he performed in mehfils (Dervish gatherings) and for weddings, while at present his songs are listened to online around the world.^[7] In 2018 the Kashmiri- and Urdu-language poet and musician and his band , invited Shah to produce a Kashmiri-language single 'Ride Home'.^[8] It proved a great success, watched online by over 3 million viewers.

References[]