Singer Arooj Aftab: ‘I’m a digger — I like old recordings and old texts’

In her teenage years, Arooj Aftab came to a realisation. “The only thing I cared about was music. Other people care about family and friends. I just don’t.”

This single-mindedness took some time to pay off. She was in her mid-thirties by the time her album Vulture Prince became a surprise hit, winning the first Grammy for a Pakistani musician. (Delivery of the physical statuette has been slow: “I still don’t have it,” she wails.) Largely sung in Urdu, the album recast ghazal lyrics — a traditional ballad form — as minimalist, meditative jazz, an intense and enveloping world of stillness. It is now being re-released in an expanded edition, and Aftab is embarking on a European tour that includes a sold-out show at the Barbican in London and an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival.

She was born in Riyadh, where her parents were working as diplomats. The family remained in Saudi Arabia until Aftab was 10. She remembers being a “compound kid”, enjoying mostly the topography of the desert and visits to Jeddah, Riyadh’s “chill sister city”. When they all moved back to Lahore, Aftab set her sights on a music degree at Berklee in Boston, then the only institution that would offer an education in a combination of jazz and studio skills rather than the classical conservatoire syllabus.

“I got what I wanted,” she says. “Plus student loans . . .” She also gained an induction into the “little Mafia” of Berklee alumni — her harpist, Maeve Gilchrist, is a friend from those days, and other doors have been opened.

Aftab enjoyed a measure of viral fame for songs she released online, including a spectral, 10-minute cover of “Hallelujah” and some of her own compositions. But it was 2014 before she released her first album, Bird Under Water, which made a foray into the repertoire more assuredly realised on Vulture Prince. A second album, Siren Islands, she half disowns as “experiments I didn’t think I’d put out”: it was a set of ambient soundscapes closer to her side-hustle of soundtrack and video game work. She was “spending 80 per cent of life” holding down a day job as an audio engineer — that Berklee training — as the album finally came into shape.

Vulture Prince is an album, at least in part, about grief. It is dedicated to her brother Maher, who died while it was being recorded. And one of its standout songs, “Saans Lo”, is based on a text by Annie Ali Khan, who died in a fire in Karachi in 2016. Khan, a writer and journalist who befriended Aftab when she moved to New York, had written the poem and suggested that it would be a great text for her to set. “I hadn’t paid attention but when she died I went back and found it.” Aftab makes this a “posthumous last interaction”. The song unfolds in slow descending guitar chords with mere wisps of harp. “Pick up the pieces of your broken heart,” Aftab urges. “Breathe.” The music dies away almost to nothing. “They may not be here, but their memory runs through your veins.”

The only song in English is “Last Night”, a setting of a poem by the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi. “Last night my beloved was like the moon,” Aftab sings, unaccompanied, “so beautiful” — before a chorus of her own voice, processed, joins in. Many of the other lyrics come from ghazals, traditionally played by a singer, a harmonium player and a tabla player. The bulk of the words used on the record were written in the 19th and early 20th centuries. “I’m a digger — I listen to old recordings, I like reading old texts.” But Aftab is quick to correct the notion that her songs are straight reworkings. “I grew up listening to ghazals but I am definitely not reimagining ghazals. I am borrowing from the poetry that has been set to the form.” She admires poetry that has an elliptical quality. “I like when things are secret rather than in your face, telling you everything at once. Really good Urdu poetry can say a lot of things without saying too much.”

The recent prominence of music from beyond the mainstream, Aftab thinks, has opened audiences’ ears to her Urdu singing. “Trap and Latin American and [the Puerto Rican rapper] Bad Bunny and [the Spanish flamenco singer] Rosalía took over the industry. That contributed to the ability to listen to music that’s not in English and not freak out about it.”

The re-release adds an extra song, “Udhero Na”, featuring shimmering sitar from Anoushka Shankar interweaving with Gilchrist’s harp. The two met when Shankar performed her first solo album Rise at Berklee. “There haven’t been a lot of women who look like me doing an independent solo thing in music that’s also deeply rooted in classical music.” Shankar remained a mentor, and finally “the stars aligned” for this collaboration, reviving one of Aftab’s early unofficial releases. “Undo, please,” begs the title, imploring the subject of an old infatuation to release the singer to continue with her life.

As well as touring, Aftab has other projects in play. She is starting to write songs for a new record (a quicker follow-up this time than the previous seven-year gap). She is scoring a documentary — she will not be drawn on its subject matter other than to joke that it is “shady stuff”. And she has been commissioned to make a sound installation for the “cubes of perpetual light”, food-growing boxes that will be distributed across Scotland later this year as part of the Unboxed Festival.

Although its soundscape is sparse, Vulture Prince features a surprising number of musicians. Live, her band is usually just a three-piece: herself, Gilchrist on harp and Petros Klampanis on double bass. At the Barbican, the sound will be rounded out by Darian Donovan Thomas on violin. Aftab insists that intimate music can work in a large space: “Every single person is there to listen.” She talks about the “pin-drop silence”, the audience there to engage. “The intimacy of the music is very individual: there’s a huge sound blanket that hugs everyone. It’s cool with a lot of people.”

Arooj Aftab plays the Barbican on June 17, and touring. ‘Vulture Prince’ is re-released on Verve on June 24, aroojaftabmusic.com