Arooj Aftab's album 'Night Reign' explores love, longing, solitude and intimacy
shab-e-hijr—in their ghazals. Brooklyn-via-Lahore singer and composer Arooj Aftab channels this rich semiotic tradition (among others) on her fourth solo album Night Reign, a loose concept album about the night and all it symbolises—love, longing, solitude, intimacy, and a little Bacchanalian excess. Gently finger-plucked guitar, shimmering harp, percussive bass and nimble electric piano runs come together in a spectral folk-jazz filigree, with Aftab’s sumptuous contralto soaring to fill the spaces in between, shading the night in broad brushstrokes of heartbreak and ecstasy.
Aftab’s music exists in a liminal space between the traditional and the contemporary, between East and West, laying claim to multiple cultural inheritances without privileging one over the other. It’s an approach that reflects her own multi-hyphenated identity.
She was born in Saudi Arabia and only moved home to Pakistan when she was 11, where she fell in love with the Sufi devotional music of ghazal connoisseur Begum Akhtar and the soulful jazz of Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. Her first brush with fame came in the early 2000s, when she put out a charming, deeply intimate 10-minute long cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which went viral on the desi internet.
The Pakistani indie scene of the time was in the middle of a remarkably febrile, experimental phase, and Aftab stood out as one of its more unique and promising voices. But it was still a fledgling scene, with little infrastructure and no proven pathway to success, so she moved to Boston in 2005 to study music production and engineering.
A few years later, she shifted base to New York, where she immersed herself in the city’s jazz scene. All these disparate influences come together to
. Read more on livemint.com
