ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Arooj Aftab, who scored her first Grammy in 2022, had been nominated in two categories for the 2024 Grammy Awards, the highest honors in the music industry, which will take place on Feb. 4 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
Aftab last year became the first Pakistani singer to win a Grammy for her song Mohabbat in the Best Global Performance category.
This year, she is nominated in the Best Alternative Jazz Album category, which awards vocal or instrumental albums containing greater than 75 percent playing time of new Alternative jazz recordings, as well as Best Global Music Performance, for new vocal or instrumental global music recordings.
“I feel like this category [Best Global Performance] in of itself has been insane… it should this be called yacht party category,” Aftab said onstage at the 64th GRAMMY Awards last year, after she won in the category. “I made [this record] about everything that broke me and put me back together. Thank you for listening to it and making it yours.”
The 37-year-old, who has lived in New York for some 15 years, has been steadily gaining global attention for her work that fuses ancient Sufi traditions with folk and jazz.
After growing up in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Aftab moved to the US at age 19 to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston. The now Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter first gained critical acclaim for Bird Under Water and Siren Islands in the mid-2010s, but it was 2021’s Vulture Prince — a delicate, seven-track project dedicated to the memory of her late brother — that propelled Aftab to stardom.
