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.
South London’s own nocturnalist Klein blows the whistle on more covert goings-on as she lifts the lid on her upcoming album marked. From the selfsame capital, Bag of Bones the quartet of Riley Stone-Lonergan on tenor saxophone, Rick Simpson on piano, Oli Hayhurst on the double bass and Will Glaser on drums also get in on the ambiance, conjuring reflections down waterlogged streets with bluesy echoes of the Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley tune ‘Freddie Freeloader’.
Three years in the making, the Livity Sound alumni Azu Tiwaline and Forest Drive West offer a typically lean and dubby apparition of techno on their four-track extended play Fluids in Motion. Through plangent percussion, pellucid synthesizers and prepared guitar plus strings, the Guatemalan cellist and vocalist Mabe Fratti summons an hallucinatory caustics. And stranded on a rocky outcrop, flapping like a fish out of water before swaying with a skeletal swagger through a sinuous blend of choral vocals and hand drums, the conch-blowing aluminium mermaid Violence Gratuite with the Ugandan percussionist Maganda Shakul drops the title track to her impending solo debut Baleine à Boss.
Seeking out a little bit of tranquility during the first throes of fatherhood, the Kentucky-based guitarist, composer and curator Nathan Salsburg settled his daughter Talya in the crook of his arm and discovered that he could stretch the moment. Recalling the song ‘The Evidence’ by Lungfish which he had learned to play by heart in his youth, Salsburg realised that he could play the guitar part by noodling with one hand while the other rocked Talya gently to sleep. ‘It was therapeutic and calming and just lovely for me’ he says, and even more importantly it worked on her, especially as Salsburg turned the five-minute post-punk track into a fathomless ten-minute or twenty-minute or even hourlong mantra.
Talya became a toddler but the makeshift lullaby stuck in Salsburg’s brain, so he enlisted a couple of close Louisville collaborators in Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Tyler Trotter to flesh out the piece. With Salsburg on the guitar, Oldham providing his distinctive soft-spoken croon and Trotter adding drum machines and synthesizers, the trio with Will Oldham’s brother Ned on electric guitar set ‘The Evidence’ to tape over the course of one unrehearsed session, eschewing the wiriness of the original for a sweeter meditation which carries the shifting trance-like quality of a raga. Where the Baltimore stalwarts Lungfish and their lead singer Daniel Higgs honed in on the totalising terrors of a little too much enlightenment, Oldham and company highlight the pliability of the track as judgement and condemnation lean with a gentle yin and yang while callipers and calculus blossom. The trio then rounded out their record with another Lungfish cover item, a rendition of ‘Hear The Children Sing’ as if plucked from a cloud, accompanied by the longtime Grails and Watter member Zak Riles on the banjo while giving voice to both Talya and Oldham’s daughter Poppy.
Finally the liminal chroniclers of Unseen Worlds excavate the archive of Daniel Lentz, doling out a series of works most of which date from his first period of living in California, between 1968 and 1991 when he decamped for Arizona and the Sonoran Desert. As a student at Brandeis University in the mid-sixties, Lentz first began performing theatre pieces on live electronics, influenced by the experimental musician Alvin Lucier whose ‘brain wave’ composition Music for Solo Performer had recently premiered at the Rose Art Museum on campus. In that piece electrodes attached to Lucier’s head picked up on alpha waves from his mind in a state of rest, whose low-frequency rhythms were amplified and filtered before being routed through a series of loudspeakers attached to various percussive instruments.
After completing a Fulbright Fellowship in electronic music in Stockholm, the nascent composer returned to the United States and accepted a visiting lectureship at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Soon after his arrival he established the California Time Machine as a four-piece ensemble, whose conceptual performances sometimes veered towards the political and showed his newfound penchant for wine, with experiments in tape delay accompanied by the rubbing and clinking of crystal goblets. Missa Umbrarum or the ‘Mass of shadows’ would become his best known work from this period in the early seventies as Lentz devised a ‘music in the state of becoming’, but Song(s) of the Sirens from the same year serves as both an encapsulation of his prior efforts and an augur of the fruits to come, through its use of looped voices and fragmented phonemes culled from the Homeric text. String glissandos and softly murmured labial solicitations give the piece its shimmering aqueous quality, with Lentz later identifying Song(s) of the Sirens as his first salvo in a decade-long recuperation of romanticism.
Tim Rutherford-Johnson in his liner notes to Lips writes that Song(s) of the Sirens contained the seeds of what Lentz’s music became across the seventies and eighties, ‘looped vocals, a text broken into isolated syllables, a stratified musical texture of apparently independent layers, and a sun-kissed harmonic language positioned somewhere between the lounge bar and the ocean’. Straying further from the academy, Lentz could indulge his interest in choral music with San Andreas Fault, a group which initially comprised eight singers who also whistled and played wine glasses, with later iterations revolving around singing keyboardists while adding percussive elements and live electronics.
North American Eclipse or O-ke-wa was a defining piece for the San Andreas Fault, scored for multiple voices, drums, bone rasps and bells, with the performers encircling the audience in an echo of the death ceremonies carried out by the Seneca people of the Great Lakes. With North American Eclipse the composer – who claims partial Seneca heritage and also briefly embraced Catholicism – could elaborate his sense of ritual, with stretched notes and an accumulation of syllables creating a wash of melodic and harmonic shapes. The San Andreas Fault carried Missa Umbrarum and North American Eclipse along with them as they took in the cathedrals and art galleries of Europe across a couple of mid-seventies tours.
Cutting back and forth in time, the compilation Lips shows the pervasive influence of California on the music Lentz produced between the late sixties and the turn of the nineties, from indigenous creation narratives and laments to siren songs gazing out across the Pacific Ocean, and from an evocation of the jumbled chaos of Los Angeles highways and radio stations to a six-part requiem for a close friend. The latter piece was written in memory of Wolfgang Stoerchle, who along with Lentz’s lifelong friend the minimalist composer Harold Budd had been an extended member of the California Time Machine before dying in a car accident in 1976 at the age of 32.
Primarily a visual artist who could neither play an instrument nor read music, Stoerchle had been at least partly responsible for the early compositional approach of Lentz, who adopted his wine glasses and fractured phonemes as a sort of workaround to accommodate the abilities of his friend. His requiem, styled as a suite of songs ‘in a medieval manner’, adapts sections of the Requiem Mass from the ‘Requiem aeternam’ of the Introit to the ‘Kyrie eleison’ to the ‘Dies Irae’ with its ‘Liber scriptus’, ‘Recordare’ and ‘Lacrimosa’, pulling the long history of monophonic plainsong out of the tenebrous gloom through wine glasses, kalimbas and harps which froth and splash in iridescent cascades and jangle like the knocking of sea shells, gleaming and lustrous, romantic and languorous with the healing balm of a chanteuse.
The coursing and threnodial North American Eclipse finds its babbling counterpart in Uitoto from 1980, with its layered open-fifth piano arpeggios and cooing vocals. It was in 1982 that Lentz moved from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, where he formed the Daniel Lentz Ensemble, his most enduring and oft recorded group. Featuring Jessica Lowe and Susan James on vocals with Brad Ellis, David Kuehn and Wayne Jones on keys, with the Daniel Lentz Ensemble the composer found himself compelled by the rush of the freeway and fledgeling MIDI technology with its array of sampled sounds.
While his previous works might be redolent of a Reichian repetition or the dramaturgy of Music in Similar Motion by Philip Glass, the Stephen Sondheim musical Pacific Overtures with its parallel fourths or the Beach Boys by way of Brian Wilson in his sandbox on the defining Van Dyke Parks collaboration ‘Surf’s Up’, the stirring Talk Radio from 1989 is a cut-up as Lentz employs snatches of classical music over a silt-like bed of polyrhythmic hand percussion, with street sirens, trilling traffic notices, blowy reeds and a mellifluous recitation of weather reports, a collage of the period before his Arizona frame of mind proved darker, a slow burgeoning of desert soundscapes.
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Arooj Aftab – ‘Aey Nehin’
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Azu Tiwaline & Forest Drive West – ‘Fluids In Motion I’
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Violence Gratuite – ‘Baleine à Boss’ (feat. Maganda Shakul)
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Daniel Lentz – ‘Requiem, In Memoriam Wolfgang Stoerchle – Songs in a Medieval Manner: Dies Irae’
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Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Nathan Salsburg and Tyler Trotter – ‘The Evidence’
