For Le Guess Who? 2024 guest curator Arooj Aftab, the night is a big source of inspiration: to the night she dedicated the new album Night Reign, out now via Verve Records.
Brooklyn-based, Pakistani singer and composer, Arooj Aftab eludes categorical capture through an expansive repertoire of study, including the techniques of music production and engineering as well a sprawling vocal practice that moves with cunning intention through and alongside jazz, South Asian classical music, pop, and blues.
The scale of Aftab’s musical inheritances were already on brilliant display in her previous album: the “masterclass in space” Love in Exile, co-created with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily. Now, Arooj releases her fourth solo project, the incandescent Night Reign. Both are spectacles in skill and Aftab tenderly, expertly holds all of their supple elements like priceless heirlooms. Her seeking, from Sufi poets to iconic jazz vocalists, proved to her that “there was no blueprint for this thing I wanted to do,” and it’s for her embrace of risk and nonconformity that Aftab earned her position at the vanguard of creative music.
By trial or intuition Aftab has come to understand that the still nocturnal moments uniquely enable healing, desire, shelter, love—each essential elements of life and living, of intimate relation to one another. Dive into her vision as she discuss the night over a game of chess with Penn Badgley in New York City:
Arooj Aftab performs at Le Guess Who? 2024 on Sunday, 10 November. Performing as part of her curation are a.o. Aftab Sr., Meshell Ndegeocello, Sheherazaad, aja monet, Dina El Wedidi and many more.
