RAWALPINDI: Though Arooj Aftab has lived in the United States for nearly two decades since she left Pakistan for Boston to study at the Berklee College of Music, she says her music owes a large debt to her hometown, Lahore, and the music and the poetry of her country of origin.
The musician’s third album, “Vulture Prince,” was released by New Amsterdam Records in late April and features ghazals, poems of beauty in longing. The collection has already gained critical acclaim, with Pitchfork magazine, a barometer of the independent music scene, praising Aftab’s “technical skill and compositional fearlessness” in blending Pakistani classical music with jazz and trance to create her singular sound.
The 36-year-old began to make headlines in 2018, when the National Public Radio (NPR) listed her “Lullaby” as one of the 200 Greatest Songs by 21st Century Women+ and the New York Times celebrated her “Island No 2” among the Best Classical Music Tracks of 2018.
“I’ve inherited a lot of different types of music, and they’ve created a route inside of me,” she told Arab News in an interview this week. “I will always have my relationship with Lahore and with Pakistan, our culture and our heritage, our poetry, our music, our style of being.”
“I don’t think you can ever erase that and it’s still real life for me even though I am not physically spending time there. It’s not a memory — it’s definitely a part of where I am. I don’t think it can go away.”
That part seems to have entered a new cycle of life with Aftab’s recent album. The “vulture” in the title spreads its wings over all seven tracks.
In this undated photo, musician Arooj Aftab is performing at Highline Ballroom in New York. (Photo courtesy: Social Media)
“Vulture is kind of like mystical, exalted kind of almost feared type of bird,” she said.
In the Zoroastrian tradition of South Asia’s Parsis, vultures connect the world of the living and the afterlife. The bodies of the deceased are placed for burial in “towers of silence” where the birds come to consume them.
“I had been thinking about how, how beautiful and how dark is the Zoroastrian tower of silence, and the role that vultures play in returning us back into the cycle of life,” Aftab said. “They eat the deceased and then, in that way, your loved ones, their energy goes back into the earth and the world, and the cycle continues.”
“I find that insane, and also really beautiful.”
Many in South Asia will recognize that same nostalgia in the lead single “Mohabbat.”
The ghazal, written by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri in the 1920s, is one the most famous classical Urdu poems, an ode to the devouring sadness of loss, separation and longing that is “equal to the sadness of all the world.”
Performed by greats such as Mehdi Hassan and Iqbal Bano, the longing in the song at some point reaches its peak, but not in Aftab’s version. She had completely transformed it, making the sadness burn slowly, at multiple levels.
“It has dual modes, it has multiple modes, it has multiple feelings going on, you can feel a lot of things through it,” she said. “It can be interpreted in so many different ways.”
It can also heal.
“Music has always been a personal healing tool for me. It always came to me that way,” Aftab said. “That’s always been my base: to use music as a therapy for myself.”
