Hot off Grammy win, Arooj Aftab brings her 'sexy, sad' songs to Minneapolis

It's an old song — one that Arooj Aftab heard so much while growing up that she had to spend two years un-hearing it.

Because her "Mohabbat" is no cover.

"I was like, man, this poetry is so deep," the Brooklyn-based, Pakistan-raised musician said. "I want to do a melodic version that is absolutely different from the ones before."

Her voice is rich, her syllables long as she sings the famous ghazal, a poetry form of loss and longing. Aftab leans into the playfulness of the text before a synth wails and her own voice drops.

It's sexy, current — a new thing entirely.

On Sunday, the song won a Grammy Award for best world-music performance, making Aftab the first Pakistani to nab a Grammy. This weekend, she'll perform it in Minneapolis, at a sold-out Liquid Music show at the Parkway Theater.

In a Zoom conversation before leaving for Las Vegas, Aftab talked about the loss that shaped her haunting, healing 2021 album, "Vulture Prince," a record that — as she put it in her acceptance speech Sunday — is "about everything that broke me and put me back together."

Singing mostly in Urdu, Aftab, 37, is an amalgamation of influences and heritages, a jazz conservatory grad and composer with an ear both for ancient poetry and the vibes of today.

She picked "Mohabbat" not only because of its longing, but its humor. The speaker is promising someone that they'll have plenty of lovers, so very many admirers — "but I won't be one of them."

"That's so funny," Aftab said, laughing. "It's a [expletive]-you breakup song. And the humor of it doesn't really come across in any of the other versions."

Ancient and new

The album's name came first.

Aftab had been thinking about vultures. Maybe because she'd been rewatching "Jungle Book," the 1967 animated Disney flick. Or maybe because she'd been considering their role in ancient mythologies.

Either way, one thread led to the next led to Zoroastrian funeral rituals, in which the dead, left in the Tower of Silence, would be eaten by vultures, fueling life.

"It's so hardcore and kind of unbelievable and amazingly beautiful at the same time," Aftab said, making a fist. "I was just like: Man, this bird is badass."

She began imagining a charming royal, a smooth operator, a dark, androgynous prince. "When I put 'vulture' and 'prince' together, it clicked into place."

The title of her third album informed the music, which she described, simply, as "sexy, sad."

Like Aftab, that music pings the ancient and new, the academic and pop.

She sat with the more formal poems, some from the 12th and 17th centuries, for a decade or more before setting them to music. She internalized the language until it became colloquial to her, until it rolled off the tongue.

Aftab also sings in English, atop a reggae rhythm, on "Night," a "Vulture Prince" track that toys with a Rumi poem.

"I've been slowly bridging the gap so that it doesn't feel as if I'm a different person" when singing in English, Aftab said. It's a little like how musicians can become a different version of themselves when performing, she said. "That also is something that as an artist I had to work on to unify a little bit, so that it's more truthful."

She often arrives onstage in dark hues, her eyes underlined with black, her hair nestlike — a "sad crow vibe," she calls it.

A year of loss

In 2018, her brother and a close friend died, and the music darkened.

Much of "Vulture Prince" was already taking shape, but Aftab made two substitutions. The first was a not-quite-ready song that she'd shown her little brother before he died. ("I wanted to crystallize or immortalize that last musical interaction.") The second was "Saans Lo," based on a poem the friend, Annie Ali Khan, had penned. ("I was reading our e-mail exchanges and found that she had sent me a poem, saying, 'Hey, you should write music to this someday.'")

She had planned to add more percussion to "Vulture Prince," to produce it a little more.

But "I was just like, 'I can't do this.' I didn't have the emotional strength or mental clarity to flesh this stuff out the way I wanted to. In the end, it's kind of great because with recording, sometimes you overproduce things."

The music that remained "felt more subtle and gentle and kind of tender."

While "Vulture Prince" is flirty and airy, the next album Aftab is building feels strong and rooted, she said: "I've been thinking a lot about wood and forest."

Being a composer who doesn't play an instrument, she relies on such images — and a bit of telepathy — to elicit the sounds she's dreamed up.

Her 'own thing'

Born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents, Aftab moved to Pakistan's second-largest city, Lahore, at 11. She listened to a mix of music, from the great qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to Jeff Buckley, writing songs of her own, too.

As a teenager, her cover of Buckley's Leonard Cohen cover, "Hallelujah," went viral in Pakistan.

She moved to the United States to attend Berklee College of Music and, after graduating, became part of New York's jazz and new music scenes.

A decade ago, Aftab had a "small but impactful" role in a Liquid Music show in St. Paul, performing the final song in Jace Clayton's "Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner."

"There was a beautiful, dreamlike quality to the way she interpreted the piece, and I've been following her work ever since," said Liquid Music artistic director Kate Nordstrum.

"Arooj is a visionary. ... Her music expresses longing that is both specific to her and universally understood."

When Aftab released her first record in 2015, merging qawwali music with atmospheric jazz, "no one had heard something like this," Aftab said, "and the purists and the traditionalists were like, 'What is this?'"

She became adept at spotting them: "They might be older, they might be brown, they're male most of the time. And they're coming to explain some [crap] to you about your own thing and how it's not OK."

But "Vulture Prince" has won over even the most traditional traditionalists.

Aftab isn't lifting anything. Although critics sometimes describe her music as Sufi, a tradition popularized by poets like Rumi, she eschews that label. While her music is often minimal and cyclical, it's not traditional or devotional, at least not in a strict sense.

With respect for what's come before, she's shaping something new.

"Tonight we celebrated music as a collective," she posted after the Grammys on Instagram, "unapologetically making what we want to make, in all its genre-less, limitless crossover glory."

Arooj Aftab
When: 7 p.m. Sun.
Where: Parkway Theater, 4814 Chicago Av. S., Mpls.
Tickets: Sold out.