“I didn’t want to record my nervous breakdown. What I’ve created is empowering,” says Grammy-winning, Pakistani-American musician Arooj Aftab. Next Sunday, August 7, he will perform at the Archa Theater in Prague.
The thirty-seven-year-old composer and singer will present last year’s animalistic and calm album Vulture Prince there. For the song Mohabbat she became the first artist of Pakistani origin to receive a Grammy this year. “I am really very happy,” he tells Aktuálně.cz enthusiastically, although with fatigue in his voice. She gave the interview via the Zoom platform.
He explains the success by a change in the voting rules. Previously, the Grammy winners were decided by a special committee, while today it is all members of the organizing National Academy of Music Arts and Sciences. “I didn’t even know who was voting in that committee. Now the musicians themselves decide on it, that’s what we wanted,” affirms Aftab.
In addition, she was nominated for a Grammy for the discovery of the year, which seems rather paradoxical after the ten years of her musical career. She has been interested in music since childhood, for which reason she moved to the USA at the age of 19 to study it there.
Pitchfork server last year she narrated, how she grew up surrounded by music and was used to thinking about it because it was how her family spent time with friends. Composing his own tunes and singing them all the time came as naturally to Aftab as speaking. She showed exceptional talent in public as a teenager. Video, how at eighteen he sings a cover version of the song Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, went viral and in Pakistan contributed to the creation of the local indie scene.
Today she says that studying music was the only option for her. “The fact that the recording went viral definitely made me happy. But I knew that I still had to learn a lot in order to be able to make the kind of music that I want. Without an education, I didn’t have the necessary tools and experience to do it,” says the determined the author.
The journey from his native Pakistan to New York, where he lives today, was of course not easy. “My parents supported me, but they were afraid if they would support me in the long term. They were worried that I would be in debt for years with a student loan and that it would be of no use. Only a handful of musicians get to the top,” says the musician, who eventually went on to study at the prestigious Boston University Berklee College of Music helped with a scholarship.
“I was counting on that too, I wanted some kind of insurance. Even though I didn’t intend to do anything else, I knew I needed to have other skills in case it didn’t work out. And since I’m a nerd and I didn’t want to study playing a specific instrument, except for music production, I chose sound engineering as my second major,” she explains. She has been sound engineering for a living for the past fifteen years.
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Arooj Aftab became the first female artist of Pakistani origin to receive a Grammy Award for her song Mohabbat. Photo: Soichiro Suizu | Video: New Amsterdam Records
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All the time she wanted to devote herself fully to her own work. But she didn’t quit her day job until late last year, just a few months before she took home the golden record player.
Today, he praises his newfound freedom. “I can’t believe how long my mind and soul have been trapped in the limited space that work allows you. This nine to five in a corporation is really evil, nobody cares about you. I’m really glad to be out of that unhealthy environment “, he states. She hopes that the success of her third record, Vulture Prince, will allow her to fully focus on her next work.
Vulture Prince presents a mosaic inspired by both her Pakistani roots and life in cosmopolitan New York. At the same time, it is a celebratory collection of reworked Urdu fragments gazellesas the hymn is called in Arabic, Persian or Turkish poetry. Urdu language is an Indo-Iranian language understood by most Pakistanis.
Arooj Aftab’s compositions seem to be built of sand, yet they are immensely alive, modeled by wind and rain, disappearing from time to time in the flickering hot air. By combining them with ancient verses, the musician tells about her own loss. While she was making the album, her younger brother and a close friend died. Instead of the original intention of exploring Brazilian samba or Cuban jazz, she ended up processing memories of the deceased.
“The album is dedicated to them in many ways. Whether it’s Urdu poetry or a piece of a song that I had a brother associated with,” she explains that the work was healing for her. She helped her through the first stages of grieving. At first, though, she tried to suppress her sadness and concentrate on composing. But then she realized that sooner or later she would collapse this way. She stopped running away from the loss and let it be freely imprinted in the music.
There is a sense of deep sorrow from the record, even if it is told from a safe distance. It allows the listener to listen well and not be suffocated by it. As the author says, it is not a record about mourning. “Not even a heartbreaking tragedy. I didn’t want to replay my nervous breakdown. On the contrary, what I created is supposed to give people strength. Like a cover that strengthens a ceramic bowl,” compares the thirty-seven-year-old resident of the New York district of Brooklyn.
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Arooj Aftab’s Udhero Na features renowned Indian sitar player Anoushka Shankar. Photo: Vishesh Sharma | Video: Verve Records
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On the recording, in addition to traditional South Asian motifs, he also plays with rhythms from other genres commonly played in New York, such as jazz. In turn, she incorporated oak or reggae elements into the composition Last Nightwhose text is an English translation of verses by the Persian classical poet Rumi.
This composition probably most clearly shows one of Arooj Aftab’s main strengths. Her interpretation of motifs from another environment, such as Jamaican reggae, shows the sensitivity and respect with which she approaches them. She doesn’t treat them like they belong to her. There is no trace of admiration bordering on the fetishization of foreignness, which, especially among white musicians, sometimes slipped into parody. Today, this aspect is referred to in the US as o cultural appropriation: refers to a situation where members of a community with a greater concentration of power appropriate the culture of an oppressed minority.
Arooj Aftab, on the other hand, rather takes individual elements or words from such cultures that describe the necessary meaning better than the mother tongue. However, he does not try to pretend that he is fluent in that language. He persistently rejects the label world music, which since the 80s has been a trade term for easier categorization of ethnic music originating outside the US or Europe.
It doesn’t seem entirely surprising that this woman found a way to avoid cultural appropriation and actually be inspired in the North American pop culture environment. Arooj Aftab was born in Saudi Arabia. She moved to Lahore, Pakistan, where her parents come from, with a population of eleven million, with them and two brothers when she was ten years old.
“I want to make things that feel fresh,” he says when we start talking about music. She says that honest self-reflection and awareness of one’s own limits are important to her. “My strengths are melodies and vocal arrangements, how I perceive music, how I produce it, how I combine sounds and connect individual instruments to create something new with respect for the old,” explains why she decided to use fragments of centuries-old Persian and Arabic verses. They are played on the record by harp, violin, flugelhorn, guitar or synthesizer.
“My own lyrics are banal, it’s not my strong point, and these beautiful words already exist. I don’t want to construct compositions as individual stories that start somewhere and end somewhere. That’s why I only take a few verses from each poem,” he says. At the same time, she doesn’t want to rely too much on language, music is more important to her.
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Diya Hai was recorded by Arooj Aftab with Brazilian singer Badi Assad. | Video: New Amsterdam Records
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Her performance sounds accessible and at the same time. “We should innovate, not just recycle what has already been written,” he thinks. “I want to make music that excites. Music that no one has heard before, while not being afraid to admit that all the music has already been written, that you can’t make anything that doesn’t resemble something else,” he laughs.
When asked about the pervasive sexism in the music scene, he gets serious and looks annoyed. “It used to be difficult. You have to expend an absolutely ridiculous amount of energy just to be respected,” he recalls. “It’s not easy for people to understand what it means to be a ‘vocal songwriter’. I don’t play an instrument, I don’t come into the studio with a piece of paper and tell you to play something,” she describes.
He needs to have self-confident and emotionally mature colleagues around him who know how to work with women. In order for her to create naturally, it is necessary to have trust in others, regardless of who is directing the process or whose vision it is. “As my project grows and I gain more power and respect, people stop feeling like they can fuck with me,” concludes Arooj Aftab, succinctly stating that people deserve respect regardless of merit.
Concert
Arooj Aftab
(Organized by Heartnoize Promotion)
Archa Theatre, Prague, August 7.
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