Profile| The perfect pitch for love and loss

In 2022, the 38-year-old Brooklyn-based Pakistani singer-songwriter made history by becoming the first Pakistani musician to win a Grammy for Best Global Music Performance for ‘Mohabbat’. This was the first time that the category was introduced at the awards, and Aftab (who was also nominated in the Best New Artist category) beat Yo-Yo-Ma & Angelique Kidjo, Burna Boy, WizKid, Tems and Femi Kuti to take home the award.

At the 2023 Grammys, she earned another nomination, again for Best Global Music Performance, for ‘Udhero Na’ featuring musician Anoushka Shankar, who led with the sitar on Aftab’s original song. They performed at the awards ceremony together, making Aftab the first Pakistani musician to perform at the Grammys.

On May 27, with the sun blazing on her face, Aftab walked onto the stage at the Wide Awake Music Festival at Brockwell Park in London and sang ‘Baghon Main,’ a song she usually opens her shows with. Aftab’s stage patter is witty. “I know my music is supposed to be intense and all, but they always put me next to EDM acts,” she laughed, hinting at the sound from the next stage spilling over to hers. She ended with Mohabbat, throwing roses at the audience and drinking wine on stage — a ritual at her performances. “These roses have sharp thorns, you’ve been warned,” she said.

After the performance, sitting in her trailer Aftab spoke of Mohabbat. “What a national treasure it is, and to be able to resurrect it and redo it in this way has been amazing!” Written by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri in the early 1920s, the song, according to Aftab, feels like a jazz standard. “It’s like chaku, but mujhe mazaa bhi aa raha hai (It’s a stab wound, but I’m enjoying it too). I spent four-five years thinking about how it had so many faces. There’s a playfulness, a gaslighting there, how he probably never met the person, or maybe he did. I felt like it needed a world in interpretation, because it was a world.”

Aftab’s rendition is markedly different from the song sung by legends Iqbal Bano and Mehdi Hassan. Compared to Bano’s throaty and untrammelled focus on a melody or even Hassan’s mastery of the ghazal’s repetitive idiom, accompanied by the harmonium and tabla, minimalism lies at the heart of how Aftab’s melismas deliver the old verse. Gyan Riley’s gentle guitar notes, Maeve Gilchrist’s alluring lever harp and Nadje Noordhuis’ flugel horn steer the melancholy; Aftab’s nuanced contemporary arrangement of instrumental music matches the slow burn of her vocal improvisation perfectly.

When Aftab’s family moved to Lahore in the late 1990s, Aftab found it a bit disorienting in the beginning. “It was a bit weird at first, and the transition was significant. But I fell in love with Lahore, its beautiful gardens and parties. There was a vibrant culture of art and music; I remember my parents taking me to this All Pakistan Music Conference concert that happened every month,” she said.

The All Pakistan Music Conference was a voluntary organisation set up in the late 1950s to promote classical arts, its monthly concerts organised in Lahore — and later, in Karachi — saw participation from some of the most well-known ghazal singers and instrumentalists of our times including Roshan Ara Begum, Farida Khanum and even Iqbal Begum. In the 90s, Aftab would have heard younger virtuosos of classical music.

In the early 2000s, before YouTube or social media, Aftab recorded a light jazz version of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. It began circulating on email and was widely shared on Napster and LimeWire, making it one of Lahore’s first viral songs on the internet.

That was also the time Aftab was discovering music by herself. “I found this album by John McLaughlin, Zakir Hussain and Hariprasad Chaurasia and that blew my mind. I was obsessed with Begum Akhtar, and moved on to Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Hariharan — Carnatic classical music! Kitne Walkman, kitne Discman ragad diye (Oh, the number of Walkmans and Discmans I wore out!)”

By this time, she said her relationship with music “was not normal.” “I was like I’m obsessed with music; I have ideas about it, and I want to make it — basically the stages of finding out you’re a musician.”

One of the best things about being at Berklee was listening to all kinds of music constantly. “I was just absorbing everything like a sponge,” she said. In 2010, Aftab was invited to perform at the Sufi Music Festival in New York, and so was the Pakistani Sufi legend Abida Parveen. “I was very much a student of Abida Parveen’s work, on my own. There was an audition somewhere in the vicinity of the Pakistan embassy there and I was singing, when I saw Abida Parveen just walk over to where I was and watch me sing, listen and lock eyes with me. It was nerve-wracking! Some days later, I found out her hotel room number through the event programming guys there, and I just went up to her room! And then I saw her in this flowy, silk gown, just floating down the corridor towards the door. She had such strong mystical energy, like a Sufi saint or something! And then she was so kind and offered me a biscuit, and I ate it (smiles). We talked a little bit about music and then I sang some stuff, and she brought out the harmonium and she sang as well. It was a most moving, humbling and inspiring interaction. It gave me strength and I carry that strength with me to this day,” said Aftab.

In 2014, Aftab released her debut album, Bird Under Water. Comprising five songs, the album has a dark, post-pop, neo-Sufi soundscape and is remarkably nuanced for a first album. One notices Aftab’s love for instruments, as her accompanists are afforded generous space to lead on every song, often bending how the instruments are played traditionally. For instance, in ‘Baghon Main’ (it also appears in an entirely new version on Vulture Prince), Aftab layers the accordion (played by Magda Giannikou) to suggest a kinship to the harmonium and uses Mario Carrillo’s contrabass to darken the landscape of the song, along with her haunting melismas and harmonies. Bhrigu Sahni’s subtle guitar playing completes her hat tip to Begum Akhtar on Na Ja Balam. “Bird Under Water should have been called Arooj Aftab sings Begum Akhtar,” Aftab said.

“Arooj did something beautiful during the recording of the album. She rented a brownstone (apartment) for a month, and we just played there and recorded music,” said Sahni, 36, now based in Pune, who also co-wrote some of the songs with Aftab on Bird on Water. “In fact, Last Night (that appears on Vulture Prince), was recorded at that time,” he added.

Her sophomore album, Siren Islands (2018), is a collection of raw, ambient electronic music with vocals drifting in and out of the pieces. It was inspired by the Sirenum Scopuli, the mythical Greek rocky islands where the sirens lived and sang, luring sailors to their deaths. Written and performed by Aftab alone, each track was recorded live and tracked to a single mono input. Aftab also worked at Genius.com, a digital media company headquartered in Brooklyn, before she dove into her third album, Vulture Prince. In 2021, she left her day job to pursue music full-time.

A new musical language

Aftab’s voice is pitch perfect. It also reminds you of searing heartbreak and grief. In 2018, while she was writing the music for Vulture Prince, she lost her younger brother Maher Aftab, to whom the album is dedicated. The second track, ‘Diya Hai,’ is the last song she had performed for him before he passed away. That year, she also lost her friend Annie Ali Khan, who is credited with the lyrics to ‘Saans Lo (Breathe)’ on the album. “Vulture Prince was coloured in so much pain, and that pain colouring is still a huge part of my life and music,” she said.

The album is minimalist in its musical arrangement and tone, yet remarkable in the manner of how the outcome drives home a sense of deep loss. Gilchrist’s lever harp and Darian Donovan Thomas’ fluid, theatrical violin playing on the new version of ‘Baghon Main’ (it first appeared on her first album, Bird Under Water) stands testimony to Aftab’s journey as an artist. To be able to strip one’s version of its soundscape and reimagine it with the melancholy intact is the mark of an involved musician.

“Despite her music being largely in Urdu verse that many listeners will not understand, it has touched Aftab’s global audience and caused them also to reach out with stories of how she has helped carry their own losses,” a 2022 review in the Guardian read. “I am proud of being the person who has created music that’s led to the popularisation or coolness of Urdu in spaces that are outside of South Asia. In general, people who are outside of the region know very little of that region, and it’s all jumbled up— from the Taj Mahal to yoga to the Himalayas and so on. Muslim countries in South Asia are especially misunderstood as being Arab countries or the Middle East, so there’s a real lack of understanding the complexities of the diaspora. And as I’m touring and performing this music globally, I’ve noticed, especially in Europe, that there’s a tendency to contextualize my music, often on their own, in program notes or in the press. I’ve been called a Sufi musician, an “Urdu” singer, or someone who sings sacred Arabic texts and even a Hindustani classical vocalist! None of these are true, they’re blunt and lazy descriptors. I think it’s my responsibility to correct this, because language is powerful, and the way you phrase things changes everything. I care about representation because it is something to fight for. As a musician of colour who’s performing at a global level, these hard conversations that I’m having now will make it easier for my contemporaries, and I’m committed to that,” she elaborated, when asked how she navigates descriptions about her identity as a musician living outside Pakistan.

Aftab is aware of what she’s managed to achieve. “I’ve waited for a very long time… the incubation period has been years. You can’t make something so complex and intricate overnight. It takes time to overcome obstacles. It takes time to absorb Begum Akhtar. It takes decades to understand what Mirza Ghalib is saying, even if Iqbal Bano made it easy to listen to,” she said.

Aftab chooses her accompanists carefully, using a range of string and percussion soloists for live shows and albums. “There needs to be a unified musical ethos. I look for the same, musically crazy person that I am. Hum sab pagal hai (We’re all eccentric).”

Vulture Prince was a critical and commercial success, but not without questions about crediting the “original” compositions and lyricists. “The lyricists are all credited. Credit is there where it’s due and where it’s legal. I don’t really know what these people are talking about, and I’d like to know more about the “original.” What we’re doing here is so inherently rooted in my heritage. This is old love poetry, Ghalib ne likhi hai Diya Hai (Mirza Ghalib wrote Diya Hai). The ghazal is not a style of music, it is a style of poetry. The people who talk about this perhaps aren’t fans of music being done in this way. And a lot of what I’m doing hasn’t been done before, in this way. This is a new language, and there’s not much to reference. Whenever something is new, there is discourse around it, which is great and invited. Let’s talk about this,” she said.

Writing music

After she won the Grammy and began touring, Aftab, who lives in New York City, spoke about musicians making almost no money from live shows. “Being on the road for 200 days and touring is beautiful, but it’s also brutal. There’re so many variables, especially post-pandemic, as to why shows aren’t profitable for musicians, but there needs to be a better model. The industry has been supportive, but we need to do better, even for our audiences.”

“I’m wearing this beautiful outfit by the Palestinian designer Yasmeen Mjalli. It’s the first time I’m wearing so much colour; I’m always in black!” she announced. Mjalli used a deep orange, raw silk taffeta, a tribute to the fabric used in Pakistani weddings and historical South Asian royalty. “I’m really proud to wear garments made by people in Palestinian refugee camps. Oftentimes, there’s really such little hope and you’re just confused as to what you can do that will actually mean something…putting on these clothes is a powerful symbol of support and adds a new dimension to my performance,” Aftab told Vogue in a recent piece.

Towards the end, Aftab was in tears, as were many in the audience. It was an emotionally charged hour of ambient, dark jazz, and Aftab often stepped out of the spotlight in silence, directing the audience to Iyer and Ismaily. On ‘Forgotten Land,’ singing, “Old friend, I’ll see you again, under a heavy moon,” Aftab’s voice felt as though it left the auditorium and crept back to break time. She knew she’d outdone herself.

She has been writing new music alongside the hectic touring. “The new album is nearly done, and it has more movement. Vulture Prince was surrounded by grief, this one’s a bit more flirtatious in tone. I’ve carried ‘Last Night’ from Vulture Prince into this one, in a different version than the earlier reggae-dub one. I’ve worked with living poets alongside dead ones this time,” she said.