Arooj Aftab - Vulture Prince (2022 Verve Deluxe Edition 2xLP)

Arooj Aftab - Vulture Prince | 2xLP, Deluxe Edition (Verve Records, 00602445427826, Made in the EU)

• Grammy-winning third album from the Pakistani-American vocalist and composer, including the Best Global Music Performance winner “Mohabbat,” a piece built on ghazal poetry, Maeve Gilchrist’s harp and Gyan Riley’s guitar
• Deluxe edition adds “Udhero Na” featuring Anoushka Shankar on sitar, bringing the programme to eight tracks across four sides, cut at Sterling by Joe Nino-Hernes
• A record that sits between ghazal, minimalism and contemporary jazz, with Shahzad Ismaily, Nadje Noordhuis, Petros Klampanis and Jamey Haddad among the musicians Aftab assembled around her voice

Arooj Aftab grew up in Lahore, where she absorbed Urdu poetry and the ghazal tradition before moving to the United States to study production and engineering at Berklee. Vulture Prince, her third album, was completed after the death of her younger brother Maher, and the album’s title took on a different weight as a result. What makes the record remarkable is how it holds grief without dramatising it. Aftab’s voice is the constant, unhurried and precise, and the arrangements around it change shape from track to track: “Baghon Main” opens with Gilchrist’s harp and Darian Donovan Thomas’s violin against Klampanis’s upright bass; “Mohabbat” brings in Noordhuis’s flugelhorn, Haddad’s percussion and Ismaily’s synth; “Last Night” strips things back to guitar, bass and drums. The songs draw on classical Urdu and Punjabi poetry, and the music moves between South Asian melodic forms and a spaciousness that owes something to both minimalism and jazz. Aftab wrote, produced and arranged all eight tracks.

The original 2021 release on New Amsterdam Records had seven tracks. This 2022 Verve deluxe edition adds “Udhero Na”, a collaboration with sitarist. The album won Aftab the Grammy for Best Global Music Performance in 2022, making her the first Pakistani artist to take home a Grammy. She was also nominated for Best New Artist the same year. The pressing is a 2xLP on Verve, made in the EU, with lacquers cut at Sterling Sound. Aftab has since released Love in Exile (2023), an improvisational collaboration with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, and Night Reign (Verve, 2024).