On a cold evening in Harlem, I stepped into a townhouse and smiled to myself as I recognized the chiming sound of a spoon circling a cup, sugar dissolving into chai. The scent of chana dal lingered in the air. From behind a closed door upstairs came voices—slow and hypnotic. 

The voices belonged to students gathered for the Saami Family Khayal Apprenticeship, a multi-week residency led by living legend Ustaad Naseeruddin Saami and his sons, the Saami Brothers: Rauf, Urooj, Azeem, and Ahmed. For decades, the family has carried khayal and qawwali across South Asia, Europe, and North America, performing in concert halls, devotional spaces, and institutions such as Lincoln Center and Asia Society.

The residency focuses specifically on khayal, a South Asian classical vocal tradition transmitted through oral apprenticeship. Rooted in raga, the melodic framework of South Asian classical music, khayal centers sustained listening and careful attention to pitch as its primary mode of training. It has traveled across countless generations and borders, migrating with the Saami family from Delhi, India, to Karachi, Pakistan, where they reside. 

While khayal was primarily a craft passed within families hundreds of years ago, this apprenticeship brings the tradition to the United States through a program that offers both the khayal vocal approach and philosophy to new students in the West. Hosted by the Center for Cultural Vibrancy and first established in 2023 in Lahore, this gathering marked the residency’s third iteration, and its second in New York.  

A cohort of about twenty students studies together during the residency. They are divided into groups of two to five students, each assigned to a room with a Saami brother as their guide. Each room works within a specific tonal range, allowing students to listen closely to others who sit near their own register. Sound is shaped slowly over time through attention to pitch, breath, and posture. The groups rotate over time, so students move between teachers, encountering different pacing and modes of correction.

Each brother sits beside a harmonium that holds the tonal center of the space. Their pedagogy is informed by the teaching style of their father, Ustaad Naseeruddin Saami, affectionately called “Jaan” by his children and students. Students sit close to their teacher on the floor recording phrases, lyrics, and corrections of the ancient poetry that is sung. Most take notes in English transliteration; one or two write in Urdu script. Their focus is total, alert, absorbed. As they sing, their hands move with the sound, carving the air as if weaving and stitching notes together, reaching for tones birthed from another register of time. 

After each class, students gather to eat and sit alongside their teachers, sharing praise and reflection, taking in stories that continue the lesson beyond the voice.

For those encountering the Saami family, the experience often feels like entering a shared memory space. Sonya Soni, a Brooklyn-based writer and community organizer, though unable to attend the residency, has seen the Saami brothers perform many times. She recalls first seeing them in December 2024 at St. Luke in the Fields Church in New York City.

“I am always desperately searching for pieces of homeland while living here in the U.S., and that evening felt like the Saami brothers were a space and time portal,” Soni says. “They took me right back to childhood memories of my uncles and grandfather singing Sufi ghazals until late into the night, and summers in Delhi where every Thursday evening under the stars I would attend qawwali in the courtyard of my favorite Sufi temple, Nizamuddin Dargah.”

Intertwined with the khayal style, qawwali is a Sufi devotional music tradition passed through family lineages and performed in communal and sacred spaces, guiding listeners toward dhikr, or remembrance of God. The Saami family carries an unbroken qawwali lineage spanning eight centuries. 

For Soni, seeing qawwali performed inside a church expanded that sense of recognition. “It reminded me of how expansive Sufi music is,” she adds, “where every wall of any holy place can hold the power to transcend the material world and transport its listeners to a state of longing for the mystical.”

The atmosphere Soni describes guides the residency itself. The Khayal Apprenticeship gathers students whose paths into music differ widely. Some arrive through Western training, others, through Quranic recitation, and yet others with no formal experience whatsoever. Language varies as well. A few students speak Urdu fluently; others learn the contours of the music through sound alone. What binds the group is careful attention. 

Josh Kohn, associate director of the Center for Cultural Vibrancy, frames the apprenticeship as a departure from extractive models of cultural exchange. He describes the residency as a deliberate compression of older pedagogical traditions into a four-week period of immersion, where its difficulty and duration is a critical component for learning.

“Students arrive with a clear sense of purpose and an understanding that they are attempting to accomplish, in a month, what often takes years,” says Kohn. He shares that the structure is not designed to promise mastery. The work demands patience and long-term commitment, opening a path toward sustained study rather than completion.

In an anonymous post-course survey from 2024, one resident reflected on the internal shifts that emerged through this process: “During the four weeks Ustaad Rauf Saami devised a specific technique for me and asked me to sing as softly as possible…this technique used by Rauf Sir has had a profoundly healing impact on me spiritually too. I had become so used to using effort and force in real life that I had gotten disconnected from this delicate, soft part of me.”

These experiences are shaped by a teaching tradition carried across generations. Ustaad Naseeruddin Saami traces his training to Amir Khusrau, the thirteenth-century poet, mystic, and musician who helped shape subcontinental classical and devotional music. Ustaad Saami is often cited as the only living practitioner of a forty-nine-note microtonal system, a discipline that demands attention to pitch far beyond the twelve-tone framework familiar to most Western-trained musicians. His sons were trained under his guidance, and now continue to carry the torch. 

Rauf Saami, the eldest brother, has taught hundreds of students across multiple decades. His instruction is concise, often delivered through metaphor and with a clear, piercing gaze. At one moment during the residency, he offered feedback to a student with a smile.

“I need more sweetness,” he said.

The student adjusted immediately, the shift audible to everyone in the room.

This kind of guidance goes beyond technique. It alters how sound is approached long after students leave the room. The program has become a point of convergence—where a centuries-old vocal tradition enters contemporary New York, resonating through the work of contemporary musicians in the city who have trained with the Saami family for decades. 

That lineage is visible in the work of Zeerak, who performs as Slowspin and studied under Rauf Saami. She’s performed at venues such as Central Park SummerStage, appeared at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and collaborated with Brooklyn Raga Massive.

Zeerak grew up attending mehfils in Pakistan—intimate gatherings where qawwali, classical, and folk music unfold as part of daily life. She recalls a dense cultural ecosystem in Karachi sustained by both informal gatherings and institutional performances.

Her formal relationship with the Saami family began at age fifteen. The meeting, arranged through her maternal aunt, functioned as an audition. After listening closely, Rauf Saami said, “Chirya jaise awaaz hai teri.” 

Her voice, he observed, was like that of a little bird.

To this day, Zeerak pulls from the lessons of the Saami family’s mentorship. Rauf Saami taught her to carry sound from the wells of her body and to listen with discipline and care—to sing with her mind as well as her body.

The Saami family has come to treat New York as an educational base for the foreseeable future, while extending their performances and classes internationally. Alongside khayal, they have begun sharing qawwali more regularly, particularly during Ramadan at venues such at Barzakh Cafe in Crown Heights and Sommwhere in the Lower East Side.

In conversation with me after a class during the residency, Rauf Saami described these gatherings as an opportunity to share Islam’s message of peace through sound, creating space for Muslims and non-Muslims alike to learn through presence and listening.

In a city shaped by speed, the Saami family’s teachings move at their own pace. They ask us to slow down and become fully present, to turn inward toward a spiritual core, to reach back toward ancient and often forgotten traditions, and then to move forward with a clearer awareness.