The groundbreaking Brooklyn-based Pakistani musician will bring her Vulture Prince album to Melbourne Recital Centre for a headline show.
Arooj Aftab’s 2021 album, Vulture Prince, made jazz and experimental sounds cool again. Recorded as the follow-up to 2018’s ambient Siren Islands, the acclaimed composer writes about the tragic loss of her younger brother Maher, with a gentle, beautiful record that is mostly devoid of percussion, relying instead on vocals, strings and keys to tell its story.
Aftab is making her way to Australia for a headline show at Melbourne Recital Centre on March 8. We caught up with her to understand Vulture Prince and what her first visit to our shores will entail.
Arooj Aftab at Melbourne Recital Centre
- Friday 8 March 2024 7.30pm
- Elisabeth Murdoch Hall
- Duration: 2 hours 30 mins (incl. interval)
- Tickets here
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“I’ll be playing Vulture Prince as a trio and some things from the Vulture Prince follow-up album that will be coming out in May,” explains Aftab.
“We’re on tour all the time and through life itself, just experiencing the emotions of being alive and the shitty human condition, and all of those things, so my creative process is a shit show.
“Processing all of those raw feelings and experiences and translating them into coherent musical ideas – and doing the research to shape those ideas – is my no-blueprint approach to making albums and playing live.”
The research Aftab is referring to is to help her understand the links between heritage, tradition, modernity and minimalism.
“I want to know what all of those things are and how they relate to me, how they relate to identity, and where they overlap in the musical culture itself,” she explains.
“I put out a so-called jazz album last year with one of the best jazz artists of our time (2023’s Love in Exile with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily), so I had to do a lot of research to know where I fit, and I studied jazz at Berklee!
“When you are participating in a community of resistance music, you need to know what it means and how to embody it in a way that is authentic, at least for yourself.
“You can’t become authentic by reading a few articles; it takes a lot of time to find true authenticity and real community.”
Aftab continues to explain how she feels the need to research as many people look to her for an explanation about what her music is and where it fits within the classifications of South Asian classical music, jazz, or whatever other category can be related to her sound.
“Who we are as individuals has become a really complex thing. It’s a really multi-cultured world.”
Our conversation turns to the redundancy of genre and how Aftab’s music is often referred to as “experimental,” a tag she feels is lazy.
“I think people say the word experimental, but it actually just means that you have new ideas over something that has existed for over 2,000 years,” explains Aftab.
“At the core of everything, it’s all African music; it’s just been going around because the Earth is that old.
“When people have new ideas, everybody freaks out because people don’t like change, and there are the purists. We don’t have a name or place for it. So innovation in general, or to push the envelope, there are these musicians who always end up in this weird limbo where they are called avant-garde or neo-whatever.”
Aftab continues with a laugh, “or the classical people just call it new music.”
Aftab’s next studio record will be out in May and called Night Reign, which will follow in the vein of Vulture Prince.
“The music is about the night and how it has all of these sides to it: the fun, sexy side, the contemplative side, or the resting side. The various personalities of the night and how they have a hold of us.”
You’ll be able to hear bits of the new album for the first time live as a trio, along with cuts from Vulture Prince, on Friday, March 8 at Melbourne Recital Centre’s Elisabeth Murdoch Hall. Tickets are available now.
