On this year’s best new artist Grammy award shortlist (the ceremony is in April), Brit-winning pop revelation Olivia Rodrigo is battling it out with Billie Eilish’s brother, Finneas, and rapper Saweetie, among others; Arlo Parks is in the mix too.
Gatecrashing this none-more-mainstream party, however, is a little-known electronic composer and jazz conservatoire graduate who sings songs of longing in her native Urdu. Arooj Aftab’s spellbinding music defies easy categorisation. Jazz, ambient and traditional forms such as the ghazal – a Persian/Pakistani form of poetry – are components, rather than complete accounts, of Aftab’s work, which is full of ancient sadness and modern compositional rigour. The point of her work is not to promote orientalist readings of traditional Pakistani music. Aftab’s is as much a New York state of mind (her current home) as it is a south Asian one. Singer Jeff Buckley is a relevant reference point; Aftab covered his cover of Hallelujah as a teenager and it went viral in Pakistan. Buckley, of course, admired the great qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
Only one of Aftab’s mesmerising songs is in English: Last Night, a translation of a Rumi poem that meditates on a lover’s beauty. On her haunting third album, Vulture Prince (2021), it features a reggae rhythm. When she sings it starkly tonight, accompanied only by double bass and harp, Aftab repeats the song’s central melancholy phrase: “Last night, my beloved was like the moon, so beautiful,” eyes narrowed, hands fluttering. Each time, she imbues it with a different intonation in her velvety, reverb-laden voice. It all ends with a metaphorical mic drop as Aftab, gathering volume, declares her lover to be: “More beautiful than … the sun.”
The crowd whoop their approval. You can see Aftab is slightly taken aback by this avid reception on a cold Monday night in Leeds. This gig was scheduled to be seated, but having sold most of the tickets and still fielding inquiries, she and the promoter agreed to ditch the seats to increase capacity. Some engrossing modular synth compositions by the support act, Jake Mehew, add to the feeling of a great, rather than a hushed, night out.
Aftab is by now probably used to upending expectations. She arrives on stage wearing a sleeveless silver coat, like a Doctor Who villain, sipping whisky; Scottish harpist Maeve Gilchrist sports a similar iridescent dress. For an artist whose latest album is suffused with the sadness at the loss of her brother and a close friend, Aftab is also very funny. Her new label, she says, got her a stylist. “So that’s why I’m dressed like a can opener.”
That high-profile Grammy nod is just the latest in a list of recent firsts for an artist who moved from Lahore to Boston aged 19 to study music and has since stationed herself in Brooklyn. Time magazine praised Aftab for releasing one of the best songs of 2021, Mohabbat, last spring; former US president Barack Obama put the track (also up for its own Grammy) on his influential summer playlist. Vulture Prince featured on a plethora of end-of-year charts.
All of these events, she told an interviewer from Berklee College of Music (her alma mater), virtually melted her social media accounts when they happened, catapulting this previously niche artist into widespread renown. She’s now signed to jazz powerhouse label Verve, once home to names such as Nina Simone. So Billie Eilish has a fragrance? Aftab’s Bandcamp merchandise included (it has long since sold out) a Vulture Prince scent designed by an Egyptian Canadian perfumier to her specifications: “90s Lahore, huge oak trees, seasonal fruit, fire worship, empty space, [Prince’s] Purple Rain.”
Tonight’s set – bar the encore – comes exclusively from Vulture Prince, a multilayered record replete with guitar, violin and flugelhorn that, despite the language barrier, seems to speak directly to anyone in any kind of pain. All the tracks have been reworked for Gilchrist’s harp and the double bass of Greek musician Petros Klampanis, a pared-down rendering that nonetheless packs an intoxicating punch. The most jazz thing about this setup is how Aftab encourages the players to extemporise – this is, in essence, a three-way conversation in which the sublime is summoned through multiple channels. On the extraordinary Suroor (Felicitation), Gilchrist plays what can only be described as a mean funk harp; at one point, both she and Klampanis percuss the bodies of their instruments. “It’s rude, how good they are,” notes Aftab of her musicians.
“This will be the banger off the record,” she announces wryly as the set nears its end. The lighting tech turns some brights on to the spinning disco ball to howls of appreciation. This is, of course, Mohabbat (Love), the gateway drug for the album, and home to some of Aftab’s most elegiac intonations. The song concludes on a restrained shimmer of harp and the beat of one bass note, and Aftab’s voice – redolent of the cool of evening, but also of overwhelming emotion just kept at bay.
