Recording of the Week, Arooj Aftab - Night Reign

nocturne, n. 

/ˈnɒktəːn/

“Music. A composition suggestive of night, usually of a quiet, meditative character.”

Over its fruition, the Western canon has amassed artworks by the bucketful each imbued with their own romantic notions of the night. Going back centuries, these aesthetic secrets jotted down in black ink onto eggshell paper are ready for performers to interpret as they see fit. However, in other musical cultures, such as ones where oral traditions have been more prevalent, it’s not so much the tale insofar as how you tell it.

For a number of years, Pakistani-American musician Arooj Aftab has been a global force to be reckoned with on the new music scene. Having moved to New York after studying at the Berklee College of Music, she has remained on the cutting edge of her adopted city’s creative hub for over a decade. Her work often builds on the long cultural heritage of the Indian subcontinent, whether in the heartfelt lyrics she impeccably crafts along the ancient lines of Urdu ghazal, or the meditative classical vocal style she has now perfected. Having blown listeners away on Love in Exile (2023), recorded with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and self-taught instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, fans around the world have held their breath in anticipation of what she might do next.

In 2022, Aftab won the Grammy Award for Best Global Music Performance, becoming the first women of Pakistani origin to do so – but she doesn’t feel that her work properly belongs to this sort of label, however. For an artist whose music combines so many styles into a balanced whole, it seems only natural that the former-audio engineer would seek to transcend those boundaries. And, as with any great poet, there lies a deep message at the core of what she does. Aftab aims to provide the listener with a multi-sensory experience, as was previously evidenced when she released an artisanal perfume as a companion to her breakthrough third album, Vulture Prince (2021). 

Instilled with a similar sense of somnambulistic bliss, Night Reign is the latest chapter in Aftab's unfurling story of enigmatic artistry. I’ll be the first to admit, as a native-English speaker, I don't understand a word of the Urdu language which makes up over half the tracks on the album. If you’re in the same boat, however, fear not. Besides the scholarly poetic techniques we may be missing out on, I still inevitably manage to lose myself in that incredible voice. Her music doesn’t defer to the demands of Western ears, nor should it. Instead, the piece as a whole remains faithful to the musician’s uncompromising blend of ambient jazz, indie singer-songwriting, electronic minimalism and devotional worship.

For a song I’m better equipped to get my head round, why not let's unpick ‘Autumn Leaves’ for starters. Its rhythmic drive of hand-beaten drum and bass propels us from the get-go, whilst a reverb-drenched Aftab allows Johnny Mercer’s lyrics to slowly abscise, ghostly phrase by phrase. In the end she reinvents the standard anew, as if languorously drafting it out of thin air. Ever a delight, Iyer makes a pleasing appearance to reunite with his Love in Exile collaborator on ‘Saaqi’, an extension of the immersive splendour the pair concocted on their previous recording. But the track that best encapsulates the album's whirling dervish atmosphere, ‘Last Night Surprise’ (reprised from Vulture Prince), is where it reaches its critical mass for me. Its main lyric, “Last night my beloved was like the moon/So beautiful like the moon/Even brighter than the sun,” reads like the mystical Islamic poetry of Rumi, or even a passage from a Hafezian ode. In fact, Aftab’s own style has occasionally been described as ‘neo-Sufi’ on account of the ways in which she manages to break free from earthly limitations and effortlessly stroke the divine.

All in all, Night Reign is a perfect distillment of Aftab's ecclectic influences and tastes, a refined concentration of her musical prowess that loses none of its detail in the process... The drama of her previous work, the spirituality of her own metaphor-laden songwriting and the acknowledgement of her carefully chosen collaborators amount to a considered reflection of the artist's progressive soul.