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Review: Arooj Aftab, Bristol Beacon – ‘Simply sensational’
Night-time, All Hallows’ Day, and Arooj Aftab is conjuring spirits on the Beacon Hall stage.
I don’t mean the ghosts of Rumi or the 18th century Urdu poet Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, whose words Aftab sets to music on this year’s beautiful album, Night Reign.
I don’t mean the spirit of artists like Linda Perhacs, or Van Morrison circa Astral Weeks, though they each show up too, thanks to the folk-jazz fusion of Aftab’s stripped-down three-piece band.
is needed now More than ever
I’m talking about the whiskey. It keeps arriving on trays. Aftab is ordering shots and handing them out to the front row. She says it’s to compensate for the “depressing” nature of the songs and the formality of the seating.
It almost feels like stand-up as she switches effortlessly from the supple sophistication of the music to her witty, self-deprecating persona between songs. Dressed head-to-toe in black and wearing sunglasses, she playfully admits to being in her “sexy villain era.” Not everyone gets a shot, but things are instantly more convivial.
She doesn’t need to bribe us. The audience already loves her. Perhaps it’s the sort of largesse that comes with winning a Grammy (for Best Global Music Performance, for Mohabbat, from 2021’s Vulture Prince), or from signing with the major label Verve, home of jazz innovation for seven decades.
Maybe she just feels at home anywhere. Born in Riyadh to Pakistani parents, she spent her teenage years in Lahore before studying jazz in Boston. Since then, her music has been largely spun from collaborations forged in Brooklyn’s jazz scene. The humour is one potent contrast among many, then – traditions and cultures, old and new, east and west.
Her own label for what she does is ‘global soul’. Certainly her voice covers a lot of ground. It moves tonight from honeyed and smoky to sometimes keening, roaming freely across the structures of her songs. She sings in Urdu and English. Within her voice, she says, you hear “displacement, reinvention, exile, chaos, feminism”. Longing and loss, too, I think.
Whiskey is also the title of the first single from the album. It is, like the rest of Night Reign, about love and other after-dark altered states. Her rendition of it tonight ends, aptly, in a shimmering haze.
Shortly after, Last Night (Reprise) slips its moorings and soars, the dance of a dervish. “Last night, my beloved was like the moon. So beautiful…” Aftab sings. She says the album is “dedicated to night”. The closing Bolo Na is propulsive and urgent, wired for the promise of night-time adventure.
Night Reign is a push for bigger things. Aftab has introduced piano and harp, capturing a warm and wintry snowed-in sound. Elvis Costello plays on a track. She even gives Autumn Leaves a percussive makeover.
Aftab’s latest album blends folk, jazz and original songwriting inspired by the night and her experiences in the New York City creative scene – photo: @massimiliano_minocri
But there is no Elvis or Autumn Leaves tonight, no piano, harp or drums on the tour. Just the curlicues of Gyan Riley’s guitar (his father is minimalist composer, Terry Riley), the woody upright bass of Petros Klampanis and Darian Donovan Thomas plucking and swooping away on violin. It’s a rich, fluid sound – hard to see where the folk ends and jazz begins. I think of Sade fronting Pentangle. Yes, really.
When Aftab and her trio return for an encore of the Grammy-winning Mohabbat, its busy, tidy riff circling around the Beacon’s acoustics, genres seem to fall away. It is simply Arooj Aftab doing her thing. Her thing is sensational.
My only regret is I didn’t get a shot of the whiskey. If it’s anything like her music, I’ll bet it’s a hell of a blend.
Main image: James Caig
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