KARACHI: New York-based jazz pianist Vijay Iyer has said that he is quite comfortable working with Pakistani-American singer Arooj Aftab after she announced a collaborative album, “Love in Exile,” involving him and synth player Shahzad Ismaily in a social media post last month.
Born in Saudi Arabia, Aftab won the first-ever Grammy by a Pakistani artist in 2022 and was awarded the prestigious Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Music more recently.
“I have known Arooj for several years, and we got to work together several times starting in probably 2016,” Iyer told Arab News in an exclusive conversation earlier this week. “It’s just Arooj singing. I am playing an acoustic grand piano, and Shahzad is playing electric bass and a little bit of synthesizer as well.”
“This is very much a collaborative project,” he continued. “Everyone brings their full self to the table. The three of us as human beings realized that we could create music together.”
All three musicians are based in New York and first performed together in June 2018.
Iyer said they felt a “sense of connection” as soon as they started playing onstage. They played a number of concerts together after that, even during the pandemic.
“It was a shared understanding of what we can do together,” he said.
The upcoming album is scheduled to be launched on March 24, followed by a music tour featuring the three artists across North America, the United Kingdom, and the rest of Europe.
According to Iyer, “Love in Exile” has six songs in total, with the first single, “To Remain/To Return,” released last month.
“We feel ready to share it with the world and to play some more concerts,” he said. “I am really happy with how it came out. It kind of magnifies something special. It takes its time to unfold.”
Iyer added: “It has a few stops where you just want to live with it for a while. It has a kind of ritual quality, like a prayer. It’s very still.”
