Sometimes all it takes is a nudge of fate to make the unimaginable happen. Expected at Club Soda on July 5, composer Arooj Aftab was peacefully leading her career on the fringes of popular music. Passionate about jazz, minimalism and sound design, she received training in jazz composition at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston before moving to Brooklyn, where her name was already known within the music community before -keep. Then the world bent under the moral weight inflicted by the pandemic and discovered not an antidote, but a painkiller: Vulture Princehis third album.
“Yeah,” opines the musician of Pakistani origin, weighing her words, which she pronounces with the same reassuring delivery that gives so much personality to her albums. “I think the pandemic has caused so much grief, illness, frustration and isolation that it’s forced us to think about a lot of things. It seems to me that, during this period, people found themselves face to face with themselves and with all these intense things that we live on this planet. I indeed think that my music, by its nuances, its grace, its introspective character evoking nostalgia, hope and mourning, has served as medicine for many people — in any case that is what I am told. told. »
Somewhere between folk, jazz and contemporary music, the poignant songs of Vulture Prince, dedicated to his deceased brother, tackle the subject of death, but in such a serene tone that it inspires hope. The silky voice of the musician speaking in Urdu – except for the only song in English, last night, on a reggae/dub rhythm – has this character that we will describe as maternal, soothing and comforting.
Between jazz and the musical traditions of the Asian subcontinent, the conversation has been going on since the 1950s – think in particular of the albums Prayer to the East (1957) and Eastern Sounds (1961) by composer and saxophonist Yusef Lateef. Decades later, the Pakistani-born composer adds folk and contemporary music to the conversation. “It’s hard for me to describe what, in my music, is clearly jazz or Pakistani-influenced since it’s first and foremost a music that is personal to me. Moreover, I have never studied the classical South Asian tradition, I do not practice Sufism, and I am not an expert in these traditions. I only formally studied jazz, except there are so many of those traditions and cultures in me, if only because I grew up in the romantic capital of South Asia,” the city of Lahore.
Arooj Aftab recognizes, however, all the influence that composer and singer Abida Parveen, a living legend of Pakistani Sufi music, has on her music, specifically her singing, “especially since, having had no classical training, I learned by listening to his recordings. I had the chance to meet her in New York, shortly after graduating, at a time when I was looking for myself a lot, musically. »
“My music cannot be reduced to the superimposition of two traditions,” she continues. It’s rather a natural encounter between jazz, folk, post-classicism and minimalism” – for the record, we note that within his orchestra plays guitarist Gyan Riley, son of composer Terry Riley, often presented as the founder of the minimalist current. “It took me a long time to achieve this balance on Vulture Prince, and it was not so simple. With each attempt, I always found that a little something was missing…”
Which finally materialized on Vulture Prince, as evidenced by the resounding success of the album since its release. The day before our telephone meeting, Arooj Aftab and his musicians were invited to give a concert in the Hall of the prestigious Barbican Center in London, home of the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The next day, it was at the Glastonbury festival that it was expected, in the early afternoon, before the announced concerts of Billie Eilish, St. Vincent, Phoebe Bridges and Little Simz.
“I don’t think I’ve yet absorbed the importance that the whole facet of our profession, which is touring, has taken on today,” stresses Arooj Aftab. I had already been on stage, traveled to give concerts, but now it’s on a whole new level. It’s really fun to play in such different places, to see people attending concerts, the halls that are full, it’s crazy. »
Unlike those previous albums (all equally recommendable) Bird Underwater (2015) and Siren Islands (2018), Vulture Prince has been noticed by many publications and specialized media, the good news having reached the ears of a specialized jury of the Recording Academy, which awarded him a Grammy last winter (Best Global Music Performance, for the song Mohabbat). In his home country, “people lost their minds when they heard the news! rejoices Arooj Aftab. “It was great, intense, we celebrated that! You know, Pakistan unfortunately gets bad press in the world, so when something positive like that happens, people rise up and celebrate it big, precisely because they don’t often get recognized for those kinds of victories. »
Arooj Aftab will be in concert on July 5, 9 p.m., at Club Soda, then on July 7 at the Festival d’été de Québec.