Arooj Aftab doesn’t just write music and then record a new album. She craftily designs a sonic realm rife with possibility and room for invention.
A pioneering Pakistani American vocalist, composer, film editor, and improviser steeped in jazz and Punjabi classical and folk idioms, Aftab is still very much in world-creation mode following the May 2024 release of her fourth album, Night Reign (Verve Records).
Returning to California for a series of concerts this month, including on Jan. 24 at San Francisco’s August Hall, on Jan. 25 at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall, and on Jan. 26 at Los Angeles’ El Rey Theatre, she’s traveling with a similarly cosmopolitan quartet featuring Turkish American drummer Engin Gunaydin; Johannesburg-born, New Haven-raised upright bassist Zwelakhe-Duma Bell le Pere; and guitarist Gyan Riley, an esteemed bandleader and composer himself.
Playing the opening set at all three concerts will be Zsela, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter whose father, Marc Anthony Thompson (aka Chocolate Genius, Inc.), and older half-sister, actor Tessa Thompson, have also collaborated with Aftab.
Night Reign started as an album focusing on Aftab’s original settings of Urdu ghazals by groundbreaking 18th-century Indian poet Mah Laqa Bai Chanda. But as the project progressed, it evolved into an arrestingly beautiful crepuscular journey encompassing the work of several poets writing in Urdu and English (with a haunting version of the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves” thrown in for good measure). The album’s string-centric arrangements feature an array of master performers, including Riley, fingerstyle guitarist Kaki King, harpist Maeve Gilchrist, and bassist Petros Klampanis, as well as guests such as Elvis Costello, spoken-word artist Moor Mother, and Aftab’s collaborators on the 2023 album Love in Exile, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily and pianist Vijay Iyer.
“Every time I put out an album, we live with it for years, playing it live, receiving love from people,” said Aftab, 39, during a recent phone call. “I learn things. I build and grow. It’s the most natural process. You meet new musicians, go to places for the first time. It’s such a beautiful thing — writing, working, recording, mixing, conceptualizing, and putting it out. It hasn’t been a year since Night Reign. I haven’t gotten it out of my system yet.”
With two Grammy Award nominations for the recording, Aftab is poised to build on the breakthrough of her acclaimed 2021 release, Vulture Prince, which received a potent boost via Barack Obama’s 2021 summer playlist and by winning the 2022 Grammy for Best Global Music Performance for the song “Mohabbat.” She followed up that album with the exquisitely paced, capaciously spaced Love in Exile, which won a 2023 Edison Jazz Award and was also nominated at the Grammys.
This touring phase of the Night Reign expansion is built on her long-running creative collaboration with Riley. Introduced by a mutual friend at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival in 2016, Aftab was keenly interested in meeting the son of legendary composer Terry Riley, as she credits musical minimalism with helping shape her aesthetic. But she soon recognized Gyan Riley as “an incredible guitar player” in his own right, she said, and they’ve been working together ever since.
After their introduction, she sent him some MP3s of songs she’d recorded. At that time, she’d only released her 2014 debut EP, Bird Under Water, and was largely unknown, and Riley was immediately smitten with “the quality and depth of emotional expression in her voice,” he said. “It was stunning, and I was taken aback by how pure it was. That’s the thing that draws you into her music, and that’s what guides the band: how we can best support her voice and surround it and create a space for her to shine in.”
Aftab has known drummer Gunaydin even longer. Born in Melbourne, Australia, and raised largely in Turkey, he met her shortly after they both moved to the United States to study at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Now based in New York City, he performs regularly with the New York Gypsy All-Stars. “He’s one of the first friends I made at Berklee,” Aftab recalled. “We used to play back in the day, and I need somebody who really knows me. Drums can get really crazy and dominant. Engin knows my flow and phrasing.”
Bassist Bell le Pere is a much more recent associate. He’s been touring with the remarkable South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini, which is how Aftab first heard him. “I went to see their show and was really impressed with this bassist,” she said. “‘Who is that cat?’ We became friends, and I recruited him.”
Born in Saudi Arabia, Aftab was about 10 when her family moved back to Pakistan, and she grew up in Lahore. She absorbed her parents’ love of music and credits her strings-forward sensibility to the guitar-driven music she became obsessed with as a teenager: “Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, Jeff Buckley, James Taylor, Crosby, Stills & Nash — sounds that were so immediately ingrained into my musical consciousness,” she said.
It’s hardly a coincidence that the majority of her band shares her experience of moving back to their parents’ country of origin, as this is a thread that runs through global cities like New York, London, and Paris, Aftab said. “People moved around a lot in the 1970s and ’80s. It shapes who we are. We get a lot of different things. We were not sheltered. We’ve fought to get where we are and crawled all over the world.”
She takes the responsibility of sharing this experience seriously, combining cadences, idioms, and timbres with all due deliberation. Allergic to art that’s overwrought and sentimental (or as she likes to call it, “cheesy”), Aftab brings all of her experience as a film editor and sound designer to her work as an arranger. She’s aware that some of her sonic choices might be interpreted by some as sounding “Eastern.” She often gets comments from people who use her incantatory music for meditation.
“I believe in the fact that my aesthetic is strong, but I do have to step away,” she said. “Are these the right choices? Is it too minimal? Does it sound like an ambient wash? It’s complex and delicious, so do I make it meditative, too? I am putting together lots of different things that are not an obvious fit. It’s creating a world, a universe, and it needs to be seamless and feel natural. I think about it conceptually, and that helps me stay away from stereotypes.”
Sounding entirely like herself, Aftab keeps growing, and each new realm sounds laden with promise.
