Arooj Aftab’s life has been one of movement: from country to country and through musical styles, which reached a peak when her sublime, spiritually calming song Mohabbat picked up Best Global Music Performance at the 2022 Grammys.
At 38, New York-based Aftab has come a long way from playing Oasis’s Wonderwall for friends at high school in Lahore to having Mohabbat on Barack Obama’s 2021 summer playlist. The song came from her hypnotic Vulture Prince album, which is mostly in Urdu but included a subtle reggae groove on the English-language Last Night, based on a poem by the Persian Sufi poet Rumi.
The album – on numerous “best-of 2021″ lists, including the Listener’s – won her Pakistan’s prestigious Pride of Performance award.
Vulture Prince is a rare album that conveys rest and calm, despite being born of personal grief and loss. “The impression it gives you is meditative, calming and ambient,” she says from her home in Brooklyn. “Then other layers open up. It has depth in it that I designed, but that meditative quality, for sure.”
People take comfort in it, as many Aids patients seeking consolation in the 80s found in the holy minimalism of Arvo Pärt’s austere Tabula Rasa: “It sounds like the motion of angels’ wings,” said one. Or the 1994 Jan Garbarek/Hilliard Ensemble’s Officium, a pairing of soprano saxophone and medieval chants that sold more than 250,000 physical copies and now has millions of streams.
Yet for all Vulture Prince’s quiet intimacy, perhaps best suited to a concert chamber, Aftab – who plays the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts in Wellington and Womad in New Plymouth – says there’s something special about outdoor festivals like Coachella and Glastonbury, where “the music goes into the sky. There’s more flight to it; it soars.”
For a singular artist, Aftab’s formative musical interests were very much those of her generation. Personable, modest and an easy conversationalist, Aftab was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to Pakistani parents. The family returned to Lahore in the mid-90s where she began her first serious engagement with music, playing Western pop songs on her guitar.
“We had MTV on, listening to Michael Jackson, Mariah, Janet Jackson … My mum listened to classical music and my parents and their friends would listen to semi-classical South Asian music. We were just really lovers of music and they kind of instilled that in us, just a lot of openness to hear what you like and build your taste and talk about it. The influence from them was just an insane love of music, really.”
There were Urdu popular and classical songs in local coffee shops (“It is just ingrained in the culture of Pakistan”) and she picked up the guitar. “Everyone in my high school was very annoying because I was making all these long experimental guitar pieces and they were saying, ‘Why aren’t you singing Wonderwall?’
“Every day they’d say, ‘Play With or Without You, play Seven Nation Army’, or whatever those songs of our teens were. And I learnt how to sing them. Quite reluctantly. It was ‘due to popular demand’,” she says, laughing.
Alongside that melange of musical influences and being an early adopter of the internet – her version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah went viral in Pakistan and has had almost 100,000 views – she became entranced by jazz.
A 1987 Indo-jazz album, Making Music, by tabla player Zakir Hussain, flute player Hariprasad Chaurasia, British guitarist John McLaughlin and Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek “was mind-blowing and started to pull my ears towards jazz”.
“There’d been the Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys, but then Zakir Hussain was so consequential it was, like, ‘bye’ to all that pop music. It was so far away from what I’d known.
“Then I found Billie Holiday, Ella [Fitzgerald] and Nina [Simone]. All the ladies just came out.
“I couldn’t unhear it, it was just so shockingly amazing and moving. It was deep and political and there was so much integrity in that music so I gravitated towards jazz.”
Finding her own path beyond pop and the jazz she was discovering was problematic but she resolved to study music at a dedicated institution.
That led her to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied jazz voice, arrangement, theory and also “engineering, production, a lot of studio and technical stuff” which set her up for her next phase. After graduation, she moved to New York where she fell in with postminimalists and experimental artists who “created space, they didn’t create drama. They are super interested and want to know what it is that you do.”
She speaks enthusiastically about the “classical post-minimalists” – Morton Feldman, Terry Riley (whose son Gyan is in her touring band), Julius Eastman and John Cage – who had space in their music.
That musical community sharpened how she could convey ideas when she wasn’t an instrumentalist and she discovered “a non-traditional style of music communication and a little pocket of dub reggae and minimalists. There was space for my mind.”
That emerged in pieces for soundtracks and on her albums Bird Under Water (2014) – a blend of her voice, Indian instruments and jazz players – and her vocals-with-synths Siren Islands (2018).
Good though they were, they didn’t hint at what was to come with Vulture Prince. The key to it is the one recorded before but which arrived afterwards, Love in Exile, completed in a day with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and bassist Shahzad Ismaily.
“I didn’t want to be the singer in the middle, but vocalists are usually met with the fact the voice is not an instrument in a clear sense of the word. It’s a different thing. But it was important to say I was an instrument, so the guys were thinking that when they heard me sing.”
It opened up the possibilities for Vulture Prince, which was not the album she originally intended. But after the deaths of a friend and her brother, she was drawn deeper into herself and spirituality.
Like Tabula Rasa, Officium and Henryk Górecki’s 1976 Symphony of Sorrowful Songs – which became popular when the London Sinfonietta recorded it with soprano Dawn Upshaw in 1991 – Vulture Prince is a place of solace.
Since its release, has it become even more significant? “I think so. I was in Saudi Arabia in the Gulf War as a child and here we are again. And the whole India-Pakistan-Kashmir thing goes on. But now we’re plugged into the internet and see everything, it can be overwhelming. I sometimes think my head will explode.
“I used to believe music didn’t matter and [musicians] were just making our little things. But it’s helpful to rest, restore and calm yourself to do the work that needs to be done. So, yes, in some small way it is more significant.”
Arooj Aftab, guitarist Gyan Riley and bassist Petros Klampanis play the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, March 14 and Womad New Zealand, New Plymouth, March 15-17. Albums by Arooj Aftab are available digitally, Vulture Prince is in a 2023 expanded edition that includes a new track with sitar player Anoushka Shankar.
