Arooj Aftab: Night Reign album review

It’s not easy to say something new with “Autumn Leaves.” The 1945 Torch Song is surely one of the most performed standards in the jazz repertoire, not only by artists like Miles Davis and Nat King Cole, but also by beginners taking lessons in the back rooms of your store local music studio: Sitting at the piano to play its melancholic melody in a minor key is a bit like the jazz version of picking up an electric guitar and going straight to “Smoke on the Water.” Putting your interpretation on a new album in 2024 is either a conservative move or a bold move. For Arooj Aftab, the singer and songwriter from Brooklyn via Lahore who moves freely between jazz, folk and Hindustani and Western classical music, it’s decidedly the latter.

Aftab’s “Autumn Leaves” arrives very early Reign of the night, his fourth solo album, and renders it like a ghostly incantation. Metallic percussions resonate in the background. Linda May Han Oh’s double bass lines follow Aftab’s voice like a long shadow follows the protagonist of a film noir. Without a chorded instrument to support it, the familiar melody becomes skeletal and frightening; Aftab’s chromatic embellishments make it more frightening. Her rendition of “Autumn Leaves” is emblematic of her way of working: drawing on tradition while distancing herself from it, stripping away clichés and cliches to reveal the mysterious longing that gives old poems and songs their power sustainable.

Two of Reign of the nightThe songs are taken from the lyrics of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, the 18th-century poet who was the first woman to publish a collection of works in Urdu. The rest of the lyrics are Aftab originals, in English and Urdu. Yet another is based on a casual poem that the singer’s friend, Pakistani actress Yasra Rizvi, posted on Instagram. Aftab unites the mixture of his centuries-old and ephemeral sources with his marvelous voice, sometimes soaring but just as powerful in its hoarse lower register. And with his compositions, which patiently come together and dissolve, favoring long arcs of development over sudden dynamic changes. However Reign of the night has many distinct areas: dirty bass guitar takes the lead on “Bolo Na”; Auto-Tune envelopes Aftab’s vocals on “Raat Ki Kai” – as a whole, it can give the feel of a single, sweeping piece of music.

Aftab, who produces her albums herself, deserves as much credit for her composition and arrangements as for her singing. Reign of the nightThe palette is similar to Prince Vulture, her landmark album of 2021, and features many of the same musicians plus a few new ones: harpist Maeve Gilchrist, whose instrument is second only to Aftab’s singing as the signature sound of her music; Aftab’s Love in Exile bandmates, jazz piano star Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily; guitarists Kaki King and Gyan Riley; flutist Cautious Clay; percussionist Jamey Haddad; an improbable Wurlitzer cameo from Elvis Costello. Their instruments drift like a breeze of dandelion seeds, in the same general direction but with independent and unpredictable trajectories from one point to another. Even Moor Mother, whose stentorian delivery is one of the most distinctive sounds in left-of-center music, becomes just another part of the mix when she arrives to deliver a guest verse on “Bolo Na,” the edges His delivery’s percussive delivery was swept away by the rhythmic roll of the song’s half.