Arooj Aftab: ‘If we all listened to more things that surprise us, we’d all be better for it’

Before the release of her third album, in 2021, the Pakistan-raised, Brooklyn-based vocalist and composer Arooj Aftab decided to listen to the record one last time. She had taken a break of a month or so from the making of Vulture Prince, and the music was new to her again – and something of a revelation.
“Building towards that record was a journey of 15 to 20 years – I had been chasing a sound, a sound that hadn’t been created yet, working towards this music that was in my head,” the 39-year-old says from London, during a break in touring. “And then hearing Vulture Prince that time I was, like, ‘Oh, man, I think this is it: I’ve done it. Maybe I’ve scratched the surface of this thing and really crossed a line.’ That was really exciting. But when the album came out, did I know that people would think the same way? Absolutely not.”
She needn’t have worried. The musical breakthrough she had hit on – a remarkable commingling of classical south Asian singing, jazz, alt-folk and ambient – may have had some loose antecedents in, for example, the music of the 1970s Indian-jazz fusion pioneers Shakti, the heady early-1990s union of the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and the Pakistani vocalist Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, and the boundless Asian-jazz-electronica of the modern British polymath Nitin Sawhney.
But Vulture Prince was something again, something apart. The album, a mesmerising song cycle informed by Urdu poetry and verse, and dedicated to her younger brother Maher, who had died suddenly in 2018, was at once old and new, spare and complex, highly personal and reaching for a sound more inclusive and universal. “Global soul” was the catch-all that Aftab eventually adopted, a term asserting that she and her music could not be othered or confined, that she was “honouring multiple traditions while being owned by none”.
At the record’s heart was Aftab’s extraordinary voice, a rich and darkly expressive instrument that, by turns, can sound anguished and vulnerable and, especially when she holds a high note aloft, resolute and utterly transporting. “Displacement, reinvention, exile, chaos, feminism and the maddening fabric of love and loss and tragedy in the world” is how Aftab once described her unique personal and vocal alchemy.
It wasn’t long before people started to take notice. Widely praised by critics, Vulture Prince was soon being namechecked by admirers such as Elvis Costello and Barack Obama; the former US president selected the track Mohabbat for his influential summer playlist.
Aftab went on to earn two Grammy nominations, for best global-music performance and, more significantly, for best new artist. She took home the former award, making her the first Pakistani musician to win a Grammy. By the end of 2021 she had signed to the celebrated jazz-and-beyond label Verve. Arooj Aftab was on her way.
She was born in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital, to Pakistani parents who worked as economists and diplomats; later they became educators and opened a school. She remembers being a closeted “compound kid”, though the landscape beyond also made a strong impression on her. “The desert topography is very soothing and kind of majestic; I inherited a lot of peacefulness from it,” she says.
When Arooj was 11 her parents moved back to their native city of Lahore, and she was sent to the private Convent of Jesus and Mary school for girls. “There are a bunch of these Catholic missionary schools in Pakistan, and they’re really good,” says Aftab. “The teachers were Pakistani, but the nuns … they ran the place, for sure,” she adds, letting out one of her infectious, high-pitched laughs.
She describes her parents as “‘70s liberals” who were passionate about literature, poetry and music – they would often host concerts at home. “I grew up with these musical evenings, and I was definitely encouraged to sit and listen,” she says. “My parents set this really beautiful example of enjoying music and the arts, and of just being really cool, you know.”
In her teenage years Aftab became obsessed with music. She had singing classes at school, and began teaching herself guitar at home. “I took a guitar lesson or two, but they were very methodical and kind of dry,” she says. “My hunger for playing was deeper and more crazy; I was inherently experimental from the beginning.”
She listened to all kinds of music, from the Pakistani Sufi vocalist Abida Parveen and the Indian ghazal singer Begum Akhtar to the Indian classical musicians Zakir Hussain and Hariprasad Chaurasia, the American minimalist composer Terry Riley and western folk and pop singer-songwriters such as Tracy Chapman, Joni Mitchell and Mariah Carey. She recorded a 10-minute version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah that became Pakistan’s first online viral hit. And she fell in love with jazz.
“It started when I heard Billie Holiday, and then I listened to Ella and Nina Simone and Abbey Lincoln, and Miles and Stan Getz. The history of the music, and its desire for freedom, really resonated with me,” she says. “I also really loved jazz’s collaborative, communal and improvisational spirit, its ability to dismantle the entire form and come back together again.”
By the end of her school years Aftab had determined, somewhat amazingly and wholly against the odds, to study at one of the world’s most renowned jazz and contemporary-music institutions, the private and pricey Berklee College of Music, in Boston. (She says she’s still paying off the loan.) “I wasn’t interested in classical music, period, especially western classical, and traditional music felt a bit limiting,” she says. “I had lots of ideas, which were not really fitting in anywhere, so what I understood was, like, f**k yeah, I have to go to Berklee. This is what I have to do.”
She won a Steve Vai scholarship to take some of the college’s introductory courses online, and in 2005, aged 19, she began a five-year degree programme in music production and engineering, jazz composition and singing, though, by her own admission, she sang and performed very little. Instead, Aftab absorbed. “I was in learning and listening mode,” she says.
At the end of the course she moved to New York, where she worked as, among other things, an audio engineer for online video platforms, as a film editor and as a soundtrack composer for short films and video games. She also continued to develop her own music and integrate herself into the city’s vigorous jazz and new-music scenes.
Aftab released a debut mini-album, Bird Under Water, in 2015; three years later came the more experimental Siren Islands – fairly accurately, Pitchfork described the former as “a murky fusion of jazz and qawwali music” and the latter as “a collection of four ambient electronic tracks that weave in distorted snippets of Urdu lyricism”.
What they perhaps lacked in maturity and focus, they more than made up for in sound design. Unusually, as well as writing and arranging her own music, Aftab produces all her records; as a result they exhibit enormous detail, definition and depth – they have an almost cinematic quality. Aftab’s albums simply sound better than almost anyone else’s.
Post-Vulture Prince, in 2013, she released the revelatory, beguiling and equally lauded Love in Exile, a “doom-jazz record” (her words) featuring Aftab in a collaborative trio with the pianist Vijay Iyer and the multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily.
This year saw the release of her most adventurous and accessible album yet, Night Reign, an evocative nine-song collection that explored such myriad nocturnal pursuits as solitude, stillness, romance, desire and liberation, and confirmed her increasing reach and influence: featured guests included the spoken-word artist Moor Mother, the jazz vibraphonist Joel Ross and, on flute, the R&B songwriter Cautious Clay.
Night Reign and her almost constant touring, including playing big festivals such as Glastonbury and Coachella, have shifted Aftab up another level again – as the Financial Times put it, “her career has grown gradually, now suddenly”. Her hybrid music seems to somehow chime with our hybrid times; it connects and speaks to people. Aftab has always challenged norms, yet her unorthodox ascent remains one of creative music’s more unlikely success stories. Can she explain it?
[ Arooj Aftab: Night Reign – Powerful, affecting and unlike anything elseOpens in new window ]
“No, because, like most musicians I know, I never expected it,” she says. “Though, as the world is hurtling forward into whatever it is that this is, I do think that if we all collectively listened to more things that surprise us, if we’re not bound by rudimentary things like language and definitions, then we’d all be better for it.”
Irish audiences can test that theory this month when Aftab plays the National Concert Hall as part of the venue’s enterprising Perspectives series. Appearing with a deft and versatile band that includes such regular associates as the Greek double-bassist Petros Klampanis, the American guitarist Gyan Riley and the Scottish-Irish harpist Maeve Gilchrist, the effortlessly elegant Aftab will no doubt display a stage persona that compellingly ranges from her melancholy “sad-crow vibe” to something far more upbeat and irreverent.
“The new album is less about being soft and romantic and more about being flirty and crazy – so in Dublin there will definitely be some alcohol required,” she says. I remind her that one of the tracks on Night Reign, a languorous English-language love song dedicated to drunken intimacy and her favourite tipple, is called Whiskey. “Yes, I’ve been thinking about that, and I was, like, ‘Should I make little bottles of whiskey and throw them into the audience?’ Is that, you know, legal?”
Arooj Aftab is at the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, on Sunday, October 13th