FEATURE: Spotlight: Arooj Aftab — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Kate Sterlin

Arooj Aftab

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AN album released recently that I hope…

more people pick up and listen to, Night Reign by Arooj Aftab is gorgeous. The Pakistani-American composer, artist and producer is someone who should be on your radar. This GRAMMY-winning artist is someone who everyone needs to hear. On the seventy-fifth diamond jubilee anniversary of Pakistan, President Arif Alvi awarded Aftab the Pride of Performance Award. This is Pakistan's most prestigious award for excellence in the field of art and music. I am going to end with a review for Night Reign. Prior to that, so we can learn more about Arooj Aftab, I am going to combine some fairly recent interviews. There are quite a few interviews from this year from Arooj Aftab. That is great, as we get to discover multiple sides of her magnificent music and personality. I am going to quote from four of the interviews. Actually, thinking about it, I will include three interviews – as it will be quite a lot of information and words I am putting out. I would urge everyone to do more digging and reading to discover as much as you can concerning Arooj Aftab. Anyway, let’s start out with Rolling Stone and their recent interview with this amazing and multi-talented artist:

“ARE DOING stuff that is indicative of fun,” Arooj Aftab says, quite seriously, in the flat staccato cadence of a test proctor.

The Pakistani-born, Berklee-trained, Brooklyn-based musician is talking about the singing on her new album, Night Reign, out May 31: the doubled vocals, the fresh harmonies, and especially the Auto-Tune that envelops her voice on lead single “Raat Ki Rani” and lends it that spectral pop aura. Aftab remembers asking the mix engineer, “Can you please put, like, T-Pain amounts of Auto-Tune on this and let’s see how it sounds?”

Vulture Prince propelled Aftab from professional-artist-with-a-day-job to Grammy-winner — she was the first ever Pakistani artist to win one — with prominent placement on Barack Obama’s summer playlist. Her team grew with her stature; she signed to Verve, and spent the next few years touring the world in support of both Vulture Prince and her 2023 collaboration with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile. In the midst of all this came the inevitable rumblings from everyone around her: “Oh my god, the follow-up!”

PHOTO CREDIT: Quyn Duong

“I was really worried about this being the Vulture Prince follow-up, and it needing to be better, or at least the same… or at least it really needs to not suck,” Aftab says with a laugh. “You know, when you have a record that people really love, you’re kind of fucked, because the next one has to be equally good or better. And that’s really scary. My mind was preoccupied with how to take the sound further.”

She continues: “When you blow up, your cute art becomes a small business. You’re not just writing about your feelings anymore. It means a lot more, the stakes are higher. The artist employs pretty much everybody from the managers to the bookers — you’re responsible to then continue to create something good. I wanted to escape it, but then I just got real with it.”

Aftab originally planned to make an album centered around the poetry of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, an 18th/19th-century courtesan, political advisor, and warrior, who was also the first female Urdu poet to publish a collection of her own work. No one had set her poems to music before, and Aftab was up for the challenge, until it began to feel more like a creative imposition than a stimulating prompt. So she ditched the larger concept, kept what made sense (Chanda’s poems form the basis of two songs, “Na Gul” and “Saaqi”), and opened herself up to everything.

Night Reign includes interpolations of the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves” and Shamim Jaipuri’s ghazal “Zameen,” made famous by the great Indian singer Begum Akhtar. (“She’s like my Billie Holiday, so I gotta have my girl in there,” Aftab says.) Opener “Aey Nehin” is based on an impromptu poem Aftab saw her friend, the Pakistani actress Yasra Rizvi, recite on Instagram. “There’s a looseness, a fun, and a non-seriousness about it that actually ends up being very beautiful — it’s not contrived at all,” Aftab says. “It’s one of my favorite songs on the record.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Quyn Duong

Aftab is maybe most animated when discussing the thrills and sonic possibilities that come from putting different musicians, with different skill sets and personalities, into a room together — something she came to embrace as a major part of overcoming the pressures of following up Vulture Prince. “People are not going to say ‘No’ if you pick up the phone and call,” she says. “You can expand your sound, you have the access.”

Embracing this kind of confidence in community makes total sense for an extrovert like Aftab. “I love hanging out, meeting new people, and that fuels my creativity,” she says. And there’s no time better for all of that than the night — especially if you’re a musician on tour. “The touring nightlife, even though it’s so chaotic, so hectic, so full of people, I feel there’s a stillness in all of that,” she adds. “I can be alone with my thoughts, I can write, I can be creative somehow. Less than when I’m just back in Brooklyn doing interviews and going to the dentist.”

Three years of intense touring behind Vulture Prince and Love in Exile has changed that a bit. After performing, Aftab now heads straight for the hotel, not because she’s ready to conk out — she’s likely still “so juiced” from the show — but because she knows herself so well: “No one get in my way with a beer, don’t even look at me, because then I’ll hang out and suddenly it’ll be four in the morning, and the next day is gonna suck”.

I am going to move on to a fantastic interview from The Quietus. They salute and spend time with the peerless New York musician. You do not need to know about Arooj Aftab to appreciate her album, Night Reign. It is one of the most immersive and nuanced albums of this year. You will come back and discover new layers and highlights:

“The thing she wanted it to do was bridge the gap between the traditional (influences of Pakistani classical, jazz and minimalism sung predominantly in Urdu verse) and the contemporary. When the record was released, Aftab told the Los Angeles Times that she hoped Vulture Prince would “transcend boundaries.” In doing so, her innovation also garnered her new fans and accolades. She became the first-ever Pakistani woman to win a Grammy Award for her song ‘Mohabbat’ (meaning ‘love’) in 2022, a yearning ballad inspired by a well-known ghazal (an ancient form of Arabic poetry) penned by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri. Barack Obama even selected the dew-dappled song as one of his summer playlist favourites in 2021.

All this was, it’s fair to say, “a huge surprise” for a musician who taught herself the guitar as a teenager in Lahore, Pakistan, listening to Billie Holiday and “the Queen of Ghazals” Begum Akhtar. No longer bound to a corporate nine-to-five, she could finally be the musician she wanted to be: a critically-acclaimed artist in New York – the city she’s called home for well over a decade. “When your project becomes successful, people start gravitating towards you in a particular way, and I was experiencing this in the evenings at parties,” she says. Which is how the darkness of night came to be her muse on this new record. Not simply a period of time, she emphasises, but a protagonist in its own right, personified through vignettes and melody. “Once I honed in on that, it just took off.”

When talking about boundaries with Aftab, it’s impossible not to acknowledge the geographical ones, too. “I was born in Saudi Arabia and it has felt strange for the longest time,” she says as we discuss movement and heritage. Aftab was born to Pakistani parents in what she describes as “a closed place, a desert, the pinnacle of reserved religion” and the strangeness she feels is partly to do with this expatriated disconnection. Growing up there, its barrenness didn’t match up with the fertility of home which was guided by parents she describes as “seventies liberals”. Bearing this in mind, her move to Lahore in Pakistan, when she was eleven years old, changed everything. It’s a tangible place, she tells me. “I’m really glad that my parents decided to leave and go to their home country. There was a lot of celebration of language and culture. It’s woven into the fabric there – art, music, poetry, dance – and I fell in love with all these things.”

Although often described as a genre-defying artist, many like to genre-define her on a micro level anyway. From “jazz fusion” and “Hindustani classical” to “neo-Sufism” – a term Aftab herself came up with in her younger years when asked what her first record was all about. Does she regret coining it, I wonder? She laughs. “I was just a baby, you know? I should’ve been like, it’s new! I’m making something that I want to hear that I’m not finding in the music scene.” When it came to an east-to-west crossover in 2014 nothing she was listening to quite hit the mark. “Yeah, someone can play tablas and put a saxophone over it but that’s not contemporary. You’re just putting blocks together. Where’s the next step?” One gets the sense that this is a question Aftab has asked herself from the very beginning. In 2014, the then-29-year-old released her soulful debut, Bird Under Water, blending trumpets, accordion, sitar and bansuri (an ancient side-blown bamboo flute originating from India and Nepal) with qawwali, a form of Sufi Islamic devotional singing, to mesmerising effect. Three years later, she fearlessly mutated with her follow-up Siren Islands, an aqueous underworld of synthesised sound, ghostly and chimerical, that took us to the three rocky islands where the sirens of Greek mythology lured sailors to their deaths.

And then came Vulture Prince in 2021, a record that metamorphosed of its own accord, reshaped and reformed by the eddy and flow of her grief. The record is dedicated to the memory of her younger brother, Maher, who died while she was making it. Lost voices, and lost moments. In the accompanying promotional material for Night Reign there is talk of “stepping away from, though never forgetting, the grief and loss that animated” the last record. I wonder how her grief has evolved as she embraces this new iteration of blossoming songs – something she calls an “unfurling”. There is a dynamism to Night Reign that feels like she’s treading new ground. And yet I get the sense that there is a continuation of remembrance, too. “It’s come together as grief does, right?” she replies. “I was really sad when I was writing Vulture Prince. In the last couple of years, that sadness has been embraced and has evolved. And I feel joy, I feel the sultriness, I feel the celebration of life. I don’t want to be associated with sad lament-y stuff just because the last record was that. Night Reign is almost fun. It’s an honest representation of where I’m at.”

With the American poet, musician, and activist Moor Mother, however, comes a different kind of sentiment – and one that also helps define Night Reign. “We’ve been waiting for this moment, and the right song,” Aftab tells me when I ask her about their pairing on ‘Bolo Na’: an elemental call with burning lyrics that seem to nudge us into darker waters. “I want to believe in a love, in a future, I want to believe,” Moor Mother repeats over a skulking bassline. It’s a line that feels pertinent to where we find ourselves in 2024. On the morning that I meet Aftab, Donald Trump’s trial is reconvening in Manhattan, and abortion rights advocates and opponents are clashing outside the US Supreme Court. A lot has happened globally since Aftab’s last record came out in the midst of the pandemic – and the anger isn’t lost in this follow-up. ‘Bolo Na’ began as a love song, she tells me, written when she was a teenager about a non-committal entanglement. “Like, do you love me or not?” Aftab summarises. Deemed “too corny” by the young singer, it was soon shelved – until the bassline returned to her recently and she realised it signalled to something far greater. “This is a resistance song now,” she says. “It’s no longer a love story.” When she sent the track to Moor Mother she said, “We can be mad, we can be upset about stuff.” And Moor Mother delivered. “This insanely hard shit,” she laughs. “Moor Mother is crazy, she’s so good.” What began as a “lame” ballad full of questions transformed into a powerful awakening. “I don’t need to know if you love me or not,” she circles back to her teen-lyric. “I know you’re lying.” In this sense, the toxic relationship is no longer with a former love interest but with the current structures that claim to hold us. “The world is lying to us,” she says with an impassioned voice, “they don’t love us.” When she put down her vocals there was, she says, a righteous feeling – almost of happiness. “Because this mopey love song turned into my feeling of right now. This is how we feel right now. We feel like establishments that were put in place to protect us aren’t doing that. And we’re stuck.”

It’s a sentiment that is reflected in her cover of the old jazz standard ‘Autumn Leaves’ based on the French song ‘Les Feuilles Mortes’ (‘The Dead Leaves’). When it was written in 1945, its composer, the Hungarian Joseph Kosma, was under house arrest in occupied France. “The falling leaves drift by my window,” Aftab sings on a cavernous rendition that teeters on the edge of something. It is, she agrees, another kind of resistance song: “Jazz is a deeply resistant music and it’s been a part of my world forever.” As has her love of singing in Urdu, another lifeline that runs through her records. A question she always asks herself is how she can tell a story through music while also minimising the lyrics so that we can “just feel.” I wonder if there is a kind of freedom for non-Urdu-speaking listeners like myself with only her music as my guide. On a midsummer’s evening in 2022, I watched thousands of people coalesce in enthralled rapture as Aftab sang against the majestic silhouette of the Welsh Brecon Beacons. It’s a stillness that could have rivalled a great cathedral. And yet, for many, the lyrics were a mystery to them – absorbed, as if by osmosis”.

Prior to coming to a review for Neigh Reign, this SPIN interview is worth bringing in. They note how Arooj Aftab keeps charting new musical territory. In doing so, she is providing a compass to the listener. She could have copied Vulture Prince or done something similar. Instead, her latest album is a new direction and fresh piece of work. Something that pushes her work to the next level:

“SPIN: You’ve pushed back on being considered a “world music” artist and you won the Best Global Music Performance Grammy. How do you feel about that?

Arooj Aftab: There are a lot of (Grammy) categories, and they’re there to have your peers vote, and the people who know the particular genre the best decide which should win. There’s a legitimate strategy behind the way it’s laid out. Music is just not that simple in that way.

World music is considered something that is very rooted in tradition, and it is less contemporary, less modern, and more classical. And I’m not. Just because I’m brown and it’s in a different language doesn’t mean it’s qawwalis like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Because of Vulture Prince’s success, did you feel extra pressure when you were working on Night Reign?

Vulture Prince was something that I was chasing. Not everybody listens to music in such compartmentalized ways. The world has become cross-cultural and not segregated in the way that it used to be. And so where is the music that shows that? There’s been a gap in the music conversation and in the actual music.

I had been thinking about that, conceptualizing it, and trying to execute it. But Vulture Prince was a big breakthrough. That was the goal of my life up until then. And it set me free. Now that I’ve had three years of talking to the press and training them in this new form of music, I’m free to expand on it. It’s just fun. And so the pressure of the follow-up album being good or not isn’t so relevant.

What inspires you about the nighttime?

We know already as a universal fact that musicians love the night. The night is our friend. For me, there is a night or two where things come together and creativity blossoms. The night provides this canopy where you don’t have to be so direct. You can gracefully move from one place to another, from person to person. It’s not so exposed. That’s so beautiful. Also, as a woman in any fucking place, at night we’re scared. The night is not just all fun or healing. It’s a scary place where things are not that visible. Once I landed on the album theme being not about me or someone else who I have feelings towards – like, Vulture Prince was about my brother and my friend who passed away. As soon as it became clear that it should be the night, it set me free.

On “Raat Ki Rani,” you use AutoTune. I saw someone on Twitter dug up some old tweets where you were talking shit about AutoTune.

When AutoTune came out, it was introduced to the music industry as a corrective device. And so of course, as a 23-year-old vocalist, I was like, “Fuck AutoTune!” But since then it’s evolved so much with artists like James Blake and Imogen Heap and Cher and T-Pain and Snoop and Kanye and Kid Cudi. They have innovated how vocals can be presented while still remaining soulful and non-destructive of the actual essence of the voice.

There was a feeling on Night Reign about not being so formal or sad or precious, and I think “Raat Ki Rani” is really playful. It’s sultry and inviting. And when I put AutoTune on that, it fit the mood of the song and nudged audiences into feeling a little lighthearted.

Tessa Thompson directed the “Raat Ki Rani” video. You also worked with her dad [Chocolate Genius] on the album. How did you connect?

I’ve been a fan of her work for a really long time. And then we became friends over the course of the last few years. Tessa was in London, and I had a show, and she came to that, and we hung out after. We realized that we really like each other, and there’s a genuineness that is rare in our industries. I had thought of her while I was writing the album. I was like, “Hey, I think you should be in the music video because you’ve been a muse for some of this music,” and then it was her idea to direct it instead. That’s an honor.

I think because your music is “serious music,” people think of you as a very serious person. People think artists are exactly like what their music sounds like.

I’m still conditioning people to move away from their surface level prejudice of what they think this is and who they think the followers are and the collaborators are. So many responses were like, “Wow, what a crossover! Penn Badgley likes Arooj Aftab’s music?” Welcome to the new world. Where people are not boxing everybody in in this way, and these crossovers are very natural and very New York, and this is just what the music does to people.

From Penn to Tessa to Obama to Elvis Costello, people are gravitating towards this music. Even in the way that I choose who to invite to collaborate with me, these are subtle ways in which I’m teaching everybody to chill out and be cool and just let music take you where it needs to go and not worry about my ethnicity or your own ethnicity. And that’s something to celebrate.

Does it feel different singing in different languages? You use English more on an everyday basis, but the majority of your music is in Urdu.

I’m pretty purely bilingual. But I like Urdu because it is a minimalist language in the way that I use it, where it’s phrases and sentences that are more metaphoric. The name of the flower is not jasmine, it’s “queen of the night.” The Urdu language is not so wordy, because the words already have so much meaning.

One phrase that you’ve used to describe your music is “hopeful disdain.” What does that mean to you?

The state of the world is awful and upsetting, and there’s a lot of melancholy there, but it’s also beautiful. The emphasis is that there’s still hope. There are these glimmers of sunshine in all the music. The world-building never gets really dark. It’s always still hopeful while acknowledging how fucked up things are”.

It is almost time to get to one of the many positive reviews for Night Reign. Surely among the very best albums of this year, I do genuinely think that it will enrich everyone’s life. You need to hear it! On 9th July, Arooj Aftab plays OMEARA in London. I would urge people to get a ticket if they can. An artist who really needs to be seen in the flesh.

I will finish with a review from Pitchfork. It is brilliant seeing all the wonderful reviews for an essential and powerful work. Arooj Aftab is a truly exceptional artist and composer. She should be known by the world. I can see her releasing many more albums in the future. She seems to grow stronger with each release. That is why I want to highlight her here:

“It isn’t easy to say something new with “Autumn Leaves.” The 1945 torch song is surely one of the most performed standards in the jazz repertoire, not only by the likes of Miles Davis and Nat King Cole, but also by the beginners taking lessons in the back rooms of your local store music store: sitting down at a piano to play its wistful minor-key melody is a bit like the jazz version of picking up an electric guitar and going straight for “Smoke on the Water.” Putting your rendition on a new album in 2024 is either a conservative move or a bold one. For Arooj Aftab, the Brooklyn-via-Lahore singer and composer who moves freely between jazz, folk, and Hindustani and Western classical music, it is decidedly the latter.

Aftab’s “Autumn Leaves” comes early on Night Reign, her fourth solo album, and renders it as a ghostly incantation. Metallic percussion clatters in the background. Linda May Han Oh’s upright bass lines follow Aftab’s vocal like an elongated shadow follows the protagonist of a noir film. Without a chordal instrument to support it, the familiar tune becomes skeletal and spooky; Aftab’s chromatic embellishments make it spookier. Her take on “Autumn Leaves” is emblematic of the way she works: drawing from tradition while at the same time estranging it, stripping away clichés and stock devices to reveal the mysterious longing that gives the old poems and songs their lasting power.

Two of Night Reign’s songs take their words from Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, the 18th-century poet who was the first woman to publish a collection of work in Urdu. Other lyrics are Aftab originals, in both English and Urdu. Still another is based on an offhanded poem that the singer’s friend, the Pakistani actress Yasra Rizvi, posted to Instagram. Aftab unites her source material’s mix of the centuries-old and the ephemeral with her wondrous voice, sometimes soaring but just as potent in its husky lower register. And with her compositions, which patiently gather and dissolve, favoring long arcs of development over sudden dynamic shifts. Though Night Reign has plenty of distinct zones—grungy bass guitar takes the lead on “Bolo Na”; Auto-Tune drapes Aftab’s voice on “Raat Ki Kai”—as a whole it can have the feeling of a single sweeping piece of music.

Aftab, who produces her albums herself, deserves as much credit for her composing and arranging as she does for her singing. Night Reign’s palette is similar to Vulture Prince, her 2021 breakout album, and features many of the same players along with a few new ones: harpist Maeve Gilchrist, whose instrument is second only to Aftab’s singing as the signature sound of her music; Aftab’s Love in Exile bandmates, jazz piano star Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily; guitarists Kaki King and Gyan Riley; flautist Cautious Clay; percussionist Jamey Haddad; an unlikely Wurlitzer cameo from Elvis Costello. Their instruments drift like a breeze of dandelion seeds, in the same general direction but with independent and unpredictable paths between one point and another. Even Moor Mother, whose stentorian spoken-word is one of the most distinctive sounds in left-of-center music, becomes just another element of the melange when she arrives to deliver a guest verse on “Bolo Na,” the percussive edges of her delivery swept up in the song’s half-time rhythmic churn.

Though actual percussion remains sparse, Night Reign grooves harder than its predecessor, which featured almost no drums. Even when the rhythm instruments sit back, there’s almost always a sense of an insistent pulse, an effect that’s especially pronounced on opener “Aey Nehin”: an acoustic guitar carries it, then a harp, then some hand percussion—all sharing the responsibility for keeping up momentum, tossing it back and forth, and dancing a little more freely when it’s someone else’s turn to hold it down. (Whether or not he’s a direct influence on Aftab, Gyan Riley’s father Terry, the master minimalist composer, sometimes comes to mind in moments like these.) On “Last Night Reprise,” a setting of an English translation of a poem by Rumi, Petros Klampanis’ bass is the lone pace-keeper, pressing on with a simple ostinato as the rest of the players wander into clamorous free improv during the instrumental middle section. They cohere again behind Aftab when she returns to the mic for the thrilling finale. “Last night my beloved was like the moon,” she sings, alternating between heroic long tones and frantic rushes of syllables. “So beautiful like the moon.”

Vulture Prince, which Aftab recorded in the aftermath of her younger brother’s death, is an album haunted by grief. Night Reign is less tethered to a single theme: Aftab originally conceived it as a collection of settings of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda’s work, then abandoned the idea when it began to feel constrictive. But if there’s one situation or emotion that persists across its songs—even “Autumn Leaves”—it is loving someone who isn’t there. It’s in the words, whether adapted from 18th-century poetry or an Instagram post, and in the mixture of tenderness and tough resolve that characterizes Aftab’s singing. It’s also in the music itself, in the vaporous way the instruments hover around some unspoken center, drawing as much attention to the negative space as the sound, and in the pulse that seems to keep going even when you can’t actually hear it. Almost anyone can relate to the feeling Night Reign renders in sound: the object of your affection may be gone, but the memories and desire that linger on are just as real”.

Such a sensational and sublime composer, producer and artist, the New York-based Pakistani genius is a fairly new discovery to me. Arooj Aftab’s Night Reign is an album that will stay with you long after you have heard it. I have passed through it a few times. If you are not familiar with Arooj Aftab than make sure that you acquaint yourself with her work. She is an artist that truly…