Drawing from Sufi devotionals and odes to separation or unrequited love, Arooj Aftab’s third studio album Vulture Prince proved as intoxicating as Shalimar or opium, the swirling ache of its six scorched songs managing to seamlessly incorporate everything from the improvisational sweep of the raga to the squelch and skank of reggae and the encompassing arch of jazz as the singer and composer evoked Parsi funeral structures and spun lines by the mystic poet Rumi, plus devastating couplets from the ghazals of Mirza Ghalib, Hafeez Hoshiarpuri and Sudarshan Faakir.
A moonlit romance characterised by an all-consuming passion and labyrinthine dead-ends, wearing its scars and stirred by pangs of defiance, the record proved a breakthrough for Aftab who became the first ever Pakistani artist to win a Grammy, yet she doubled down on her artistry, addending Vulture Prince with a jazzy rework of the Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan song ‘Halka Halka Suroor’ then releasing Love in Exile with the pianist Vijay Iyer and the shapeshifting Shahzad Ismaily on bass and Moog, a suite of songs recorded live with minimal editing, shifting from glacial reveries to separation anxiety-induced furies, with the seamless explorer and intrepid collaborator Iyer adding ‘I hear Shahzad and myself establishing these haunted cycles, then slowly transforming them, as Arooj glides across like a dark moon’.
Still as she relishes some of the new-found spotlight on qawwali and the ghazal form, recognising her role in stretching the boundaries of her listeners, as part of the same process Aftab wishes to be known as more than a singer of Urdu. What’s more the compositional phase of Vulture Prince was marked by intense loss, as she suffered the death of her younger brother Maher, to whom the record is dedicated, and her close friend Annie Ali Khan, an author and journalist whose words emphasised the subdued yet restless drone of ‘Saans Lo’.
Describing Vulture Prince as a record ‘about revisiting places I’ve called mine, places that don’t necessarily exist anymore. It’s about people, friendships, relationships – some relationships that were unexpectedly short term, and how to deal with that’, with her new album Night Reign the artist grasps the fullness of the present, sultry if still somewhat furtive, open-ended and open-hearted as it scurries and rushes under a cover of dark. It is a record which embraces the bounty of the night, through a stirring cavalcade of nocturnal imagery, from the binaural crunch of a wet pavement underfoot as club music and sirens blare, neon lights glow and the senses prick up, to a surfeit of drink and the wispy early-hours air which presages the flush of the morning.
‘Aey Nehin’ opens Night Reign with the coiled fluttering of fingerpicked guitar, a song whose slow unspooling carries the same sort of decadence as Vulture Prince, perfumed and languorous. Through distant cymbal crashes, shakers and other percussive swells, Aftab’s voice emanates from the centre of the composition, as a burgeoning harp adds wires and poise to the iterative flow of the six-strings. The track was penned by the Pakistani actor, writer and director Yasra Rizvi, and features a couple of musicians who have been central to Aftab’s orbit in the harpist Maeve Gilchrist and bassist Petros Klampanis, plus Jamey Haddad whose deft percussion carbonated the irrepressible ‘Mohabbat’, with the electric guitarist Gyan Riley (son of the renowned minimalist Terry) and the discrete textures of the acoustic player Kaki King rounding out a truly stellar folk-inflected jazz ensemble.
As strained piano keys give way to glimmering synthesizers and harp, ‘Na Gul’ from a ghazal by the eighteenth-century Hyderabad poet Mah Laqa Bai emerges as a kind of hiatus, finding an emotional middle ground which becomes almost pronounced for its hesitancy, before Gilchrist’s strings arc around the solitary keys like a spiral staircase then gallop to a close, burnished in the closing moments by the clarion flugelhorn of Nadje Noordhuis.
Then a winning rendition of the Joseph Kosma, Jacques Prévert and Johnny Mercer jazz standard ‘Autumn Leaves’ opens through resonant hand percussion and a slippery, rubbery bass as Linda May Han Oh echoes and attends the fluttering descent of Aftab’s vocal delivery. The upright bassist – who explored fragility and paradox on The Glass Hours last year, between a headlong tumble with Jo Lawry and the resumption of her duties at the heart of the latest iteration of the Vijay Iyer Trio – is the star of the piece until James Francies drops in on the Rhodes piano, imbuing the fall with a slinky frisson and a cautionary snap which belies the usual genteel crackle. So while some of the best songs on Night Reign are originals, Aftab shows her enduring penchant for aptly chosen material whether it be Urdu couplets or fading chanson which long since made its way into the Great American Songbook.
‘Bolo Na’ comes barrelling out of the gates like a Moor Mother track with its brusquely propulsive, industrial-clad shuffle, whose lilting insistence builds on the momentum left by ‘Autumn Leaves’. The frazzled shreds of Shahzad Ismaily’s electric bass and glinting accents from Joel Ross on vibes eventually introduce the Black Quantum Futurist and spoken word poet, whose breathy interjections offer a plosive counterpoint to Aftab’s vocal swoons, as she craves anxiously for a brighter future. ‘I want to believe’ she intones, and when Ismaily’s bass suspends and curlicues in mid air, the smudged cadences of the track with its submerged vibes and flugelhorn are boostered by Huda Asfoura’s swinging oud, as Moor Mother drives the track, prodding at the possibility of love, out through the aether. In such moments there’s little doubt that Night Reign is Aftab’s most stylistically daring work to date, while retaining both a melodic leanness and textural richness.
‘Saaqi’ reunites the artist with Vijay Iyer, plus the Vulture Prince collaborator Darian Donovan Thomas on sweeping violin while Gyan Riley plays electric guitar and Petros Klampanis steps back with his more understated sound behind the double bass. Another song which draws from the poetry of Mah Laqa Bai, the pianist Iyer plays a luminous solo in the second half of the track, whose lapping sounds are supported by Aftab’s cooing vocals. Meanwhile ‘Last Night Reprise’ with its ramshackle bass and whistling winds highlights the flute of Cautious Clay, as the strings of Klampanis, Gilchrist and King pull apart the composition.
As with ‘Baghon Main’ which featured on her debut album Bird Under Water before being reworked for Vulture Prince, the track reimagines ‘Last Night’, which loses its reggae stank without abandoning its abiding sense of rhythm, a staggered headlong swoon spotted here by harp glissandos which Aftab echoes as she packs together the syllables of her refrain, muttering ‘Last night my beloved was like the moon, so beautiful’. The reprise then closes with a completion of the phrase, as Aftab sings ‘Even brighter than the sun’, a summation of her record’s overarching ambiance or motif, utterly captivated by the night even as daytime beckons through the twilight of the morning.
On ‘Raat Ki Rani’, the first single from Night Reign, the upwards bounce of the keys and strings both fights against and fitfully adds to the prevailing air of melancholy. Supported by a dexterous, bubbling bass line and clopping percussion, Aftab has outlined the mood of the track and its accompanying music video by Tessa Thompson through a couple of suggestive lines, stating that ‘Interaction with the queen of the night feels unthinkable. Sometimes we must be content with an exchange of glances’.
Some of this built-up tension is resolved in ‘Whiskey’, a faintly falling Irish brogue about over-drinking and the resultant sagging of heavy heads, which droops delicately through Jamey Haddad’s soft-brushed percussion, the supple and pungent and slightly dolorous support of Linda May Han Oh’s bass and the algal blooms of Gilchrist’s harp, with flamenco-like guitars and castanets plus TimaLikesMusic on piano and Juno endowing the track with a celestial shimmer. Conjuring a composite image of cypresses under starry skies, ‘Whiskey’ is all about tumbling into another person, to change libation for a moment like one of those old adverts for Guinness or some other stout where the head plunges into the glass before swimming to the surface. Implausibly it may be the most romantic song in Aftab’s repertoire, the wilting ardour of the line ‘We’ll fade into the night’ accompanied by quick transportive glissandos of harp plus muscular bass and supple piano runs as the singer bows and bends, headily and wantonly engaged in some after-hours thrill-seeking.
And the album closer ‘Zameen’ conjures watery pools through sustained piano keys, with all of the various accompaniment on keys and bass, synth and strings courtesy of Marc Anthony Thompson, the father of Tessa and the singer Zsela, under his Chocolate Genius, Inc. alias. Based on a song by one of Arooj Aftab’s most pronounced influences, her ‘virtual mentor’ the queen of ghazals Begum Akhtar, the song serves as both a hearkening and beckoning as Night Reign quivers to a halt.
