Aftad talks on how they blend jazz, blues, electronica, and classical Hindustani music beyond boundaries.
In March 2024, Arooj Aftab was on the set of her latest music video in Brooklyn, glorying in a new female connection. Filming was underway for “Raat Ki Rani,” the first single from the Pakistani American artist’s wondrous fourth studio album, Night Reign. It was being directed by Tessa Thompson, the actor switching, for the first time, from one side of the camera to the other.
The hypnotically silken-voiced musician, 40, had met the star of 2021’s Passing and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Thompson plays Valkyrie) the previous year, after her concert at London’s Barbican. The jazz-meets-dance-meets-classical-Pakistani-music star, who sings in Urdu and English, had already worked with the 41-year-old’s father, Marc Anthony Thompson, who makes music as Chocolate Genius, on Night Reign’s sublime closing track, the bluesy piano ballad “Zameen.”
“And I knew her [half-]sister,” Aftab says of the singer-songwriter Zsela, “so there were some connections already. But Tessa had already been listening to my music. She knew who I was, which is ridiculous to me,” Aftab adds, smiling. Almost 11 years after releasing her debut album, Bird Under Water, she still can’t believe the unexpected bounties her music brings her. Even with a Grammy (Best Global Music Performance) for 2021’s near-eight-minute mantra “Mohabbat”—the track’s acclaim supersized after Barack Obama included it on his summer playlist—it seems Aftab still can’t fully grasp her own fame.
When Aftab asked Thompson to conceptualize and direct the video for “Raat Ki Rani,” the Berklee College of Music-educated singer, songwriter, producer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist was happy to delegate. “I’m so bad at the visual aspect of it!” Aftab admits, the alarm and embarrassment audible in her voice. “I feel like I have ideas that are just really cringey and corny, so I keep them to myself… I was very relieved to be able to entrust someone like Tessa, who I respect so much, and her artistic eye.”
The video, storyboarded by Thompson and her producer Kishori Rajan, was inspired by Persona, an avant-garde 1966 Ingmar Bergman drama, and it centers female power and agency. Its narrative plays out during the making of a typical perfume commercial: black and white, moody, smoldering heteronormative desire. But when the advertisement’s female actor arrives on set and spots her stand-in next to the male lead, she’s transfixed. Cue imagined interludes, shot in color, in which she and her stand-in dance intimately on the riverside overlooking Manhattan.
Aftab found the idea of the actor being attracted to their stand-in interesting. “We don’t have stand-ins in music… so I was really intrigued by the thought of it. It’s this strange, cool phenomenon,” she says. As for the female actor’s object of desire, “it just never occurred to anyone at any point that it should be the man! It was always a woman. So we went with it.”
As generous a writer as she is a stage performer (she’s been known to hand out whiskey shots to the audience during her gigs), Aftab wasn’t done with “Raat Ki Rani.” After touring with Khruangbin last fall, she recently empowered the Texas psych-rock-dance trio to remix the track, even rerecording the vocal to further free Laura Lee Ochoa and her bandmates to work their wonders.
Talk about the journey of a song.
“Yeah, I think that a song you really, really love deserves that, in a way,” Aftab says, video-calling from Athens, the latest stop on a tour that’s taking her all over the Middle East, Europe, North America, and South America. “It deserves to take on new lives and be timeless. For an artist… we always would love for a song to become this timeless epic… or whatever it’s called,” this modest musician adds hastily, rowing back on anything that might sound too self-aggrandizing. “If not that, then at least have longevity.”
They’re values that Aftab prizes in the artists she has loved forever.
“Tracy Chapman, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday. And then there’s this complete barrage of Pakistani legacy artists, legendary singers like Abida Parveen and Begum Akhtar and Reshma.”
She shares her teenage-and-beyond obsessions: “A lot of strong, strong female voices. People like Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson and of course the Spice Girls—my God, obsessed! Also, Tracy Chapman, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday. And then there’s this complete barrage of Pakistani legacy artists, legendary singers like Abida Parveen and Begum Akhtar and Reshma.”
When we speak, Aftab is over a year into touring and promoting Night Reign. It’s her first solo album since signing to the revered jazz heritage label Verve (it followed her debut for the label, 2023’s Love in Exile, a collaboration with the pianist Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily). She says the success of “Mohabbat” and its parent album, Vulture Prince (2021), made her “finally financially free.”
“The worry about money is always going to be there,” she admits. “But I had always been waiting for the moment where music would make enough that I could live off it. And wow, the world really changes when you can just think about music full-time.”
Likewise, when a former POTUS outs himself as a stan. The Obama endorsement, she says, was “huge.” As well as his political legacy, “his cultural opinion mattered,” she explains. “He was cool. And he brought a lot of music and art to the White House [with his] playlist, his book reading list in the summer… It was big for me, for sure.”
“Discipline is important. Getting rest—basically, you sleep whenever you have the time and you feel sleepy. There’s just no real clock anymore!”
Aftab’s current tour encompasses 23 dates stretching over four months, with fall dates as yet unannounced. How does she maintain her wellbeing—physical, mental, emotional—with all the travel and such a workload?
“Discipline is important. Getting rest—basically, you sleep whenever you have the time and you feel sleepy,” she says. “There’s just no real clock anymore! You eat whenever you can and you try to eat healthy and not to drink and smoke cigarettes too much. That’s basically it.”
“Touring is one of the most incredible things for me,” Aftab continues. “I really enjoy performing live, so it’s all worth it.” But equally, she makes sure she tours on her terms, with her people. “I have a lot of women around me—it’s always been that way. I went to all-girls’ schools when I was younger.” She was born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents, spent her teens in Lahore, and moved to the U.S. to study music production and engineering when she was 19. She has lived in Brooklyn since 2009. “My closest [circle], everybody I work with is a woman, basically. My booking agent is a woman. Two out of three managers are women. There’s a lot of strong and incredible players in the band who are women. “I try to keep the ratio more women,” she says. “But I don’t know if it’s intentional. I don’t think I discriminate… it just ends up happening. Because it’s better that way anyway, right?” she says with a smile.
Aftab, then, is all about platforming and elevating (she directs Mission readers to check out Ogi, Cat Burns, Roy Borland, Lola Young, and Wooly Aziz) and about celebrating her heritage on a global stage. Ahead of attending the 2022 Grammys, she and her stylist Phil Gomez picked pieces by three designers.
“It was a mixture of a Pakistani designer, Hussain Rehar, an Indian designer, Payal Khandwala, and this really cool designer from New York, Landeros. So, a bunch of people made things for the night, then we pieced together an outfit.
With her victory, Aftab became the first Pakistani artist to win a Grammy—or, as she wryly characterizes it: “It’s like, ‘We got one!’”
“It was amazing,” she goes on. “Winning a Grammy is everybody’s secret dream, right?” Aftab stresses how difficult it is to be nominated and then eventually to win: “It is a huge, life-altering thing when it happens.” As for the evening itself, “Oh my God, it was horrible!” she exclaims, laughing again. “I was just really nervous. Basically, having excitement and anxiety and nausea throughout in waves. You’re sitting there, telling yourself to enjoy yourself. But you’re having a long, mild panic attack.”
“I’ve learned a lot musically and vocally from listening to Begum Akhtar. I would consider her my teacher in many ways, but obviously she’s not alive and doesn’t know!”
Aftab has to sign off—the road is calling. Next stop, Ljubljana in Slovenia. But before she goes, a big, huge, impossible-to-answer question: Could she highlight three women who have most influenced her, creatively and/or personally?
“That’s so hard! How can I pick only three?!” she yells, laughing. Still, she gamely gives it a go. “I’ve learned a lot musically and vocally from listening to Begum Akhtar,” she says of the late actress and singer, a legend of Hindustani classical music. “I would consider her my teacher in many ways, but obviously she’s not alive and doesn’t know!
“Then I would just say all the women on my team. Tessa is a massive inspiration at all times. All these guys who are unbelievable in what they do and how they handle themselves and how they can get stuff done.”
Aftab sighs and smiles. “There’s just so many. I surround myself with extremely strong women in the flesh, so it’s difficult to pick. But of course, my mother is the strongest woman I know. The most resilient woman I know. The most elegant woman I know. There’s a lot coming from her.”
Even for Grammy winners and Obama-raves, mother, as ever, knows best.
Homepage banner image by Kate Sterlin. by Homepage article image by Valentina von Klencke.
