“There are reporters here, aren’t there?” says Arooj Aftab, mimicking a diva fit. “Is there nowhere I can go and sing in public in peace?” She sighs imperiously. “But do it. Do it. Make me look cool.”
Making the Pakistani-American singer and composer look cool is perhaps the easiest assignment in journalism. With her flamboyant black leather coat, heavy shades and crackling wit, Aftab’s star power is almost too large for this tiny room. Omeara is an old railway arch near London Bridge with fashionably mottled walls and suboptimal sightlines. She explains that usually her band headlines the Barbican, “like douchebags”, and this is by far the smallest venue she has ever played in London. As it grows uncomfortably hot, she sheds her coat but then dons a leather jacket, which is scarcely less impractical. She is prepared to suffer for cool.
Aftab’s mischievous humour contrasts with the solemn beauty of her music. When she opens with an extended version of Suroor, with virtuosic solo showcases for guitarist Gyan Riley and upright-bass player Petros Klampanis, you would not guess that laughter was around the corner. Suroor comes from her Grammy-winning 2021 breakthrough album, Vulture Prince, a cycle of ghazals (Urdu songs of loss and longing) inspired by bereavement. At Glastonbury, Aftab joked about the challenge of playing such nocturnal music (her even better new album is called Night Reign) on a sunny afternoon, and it does indeed sound better in the dark. The stage is so foggy with dry ice that it takes a while before I can visually confirm the existence of percussionist Engin Kaan Günaydin.
Some genre collisions derive their energy from the rude smack of impact, the sound of walls tumbling down, but Aftab’s music is so entrancingly fluid that you may feel while under its spell that there are no walls, no genres, no geography. To say that she combines jazz, folk, ambient and western and south Asian classical music, while singing in English and Urdu, is to undersell her achievement – she makes Arooj Aftab music. A New Yorker via Riyadh, Lahore and the Berklee College of Music in Boston, she roams free. Occasional echoes of Richard Thompson (the guitar) and Jeff Buckley (the voice) remind you that those artists drew from Pakistani music, and what goes around comes around. Most often her extraordinary voice soars and weaves, but on the folk jazz of Last Night (based on a Rumi poem) she slips into tones of clear, calm authority, summoning escalating emotion from its simple, repetitive lyrics.
The Night Reign material is so fresh that Aftab has to check the lyrics before starting the gently eddying Na Gul (“Oh, this is one I really don’t know”), but that lithe, extrovert, unpredictable album gives her live show a vibrant new pulse. Raat Ki Rani is clatteringly tense, while set closer Bolo Na has a muscular, prowling groove. “We could lean into the racist snake dance thing,” Aftab says, to slightly awkward laughter. “I don’t really know how to do it but I see people do it a lot at festivals.” This produces the amusing sight of 300 people trying to move in a way that could not be remotely misconstrued as orientalist.
For Whiskey, a dreamy ballad about drinking with a beloved friend, she hands out plastic cups of amber liquid to the front row. These gifts are soon followed by red roses and spray-painted T-shirts, with the additional offering of surplus Pakistani mangoes on the way out. “It’s like super party time,” she says.
The encore of Mohabbat, Aftab’s Barack Obama-endorsed streaming hit, appears genuinely spontaneous and almost reluctant. “There’s never going to be another Mohabbat, is there?” she says with mixed feelings. But why leave beauty on the shelf? Riley, a guitarist of such quicksilver dexterity that every solo inspires awestruck applause, takes up the sonica, a sitar-shaped synthesiser whose sound variously resembles bagpipes, theremin and birdsong, before Aftab steers the song to its elegiac conclusion.
By now, she is all out of whiskey, roses, T-shirts and gags. All that remains is the transporting wonder of her music.
