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Arooj Aftab | Berlin • Heimathafen Neukölln (Enjoy Jazz Festival)
Arooj Aftab | Berlin • Home port Neukölln (Enjoy Jazz Festival)
Event by: Konzertbüro Schoneberg, Heimathafen Neukölln
Location: Heimathafen Neukölln, Karl-Marx-Straße 141, Berlin - Bezirk Neukölln
Tickets: Get tickets
About event
Arooj Aftab
10/19/2024
Berlin, home port Neukölln
Entry: 8:00 p.m.
Start: 9:00 p.m.
Tickets are available for €33 plus fee at www.schoneberg.de and at all ticket offices.
► www.aroojaftab.com
🎶 www.bit.ly/4b2ivfh
The word "transformative" may not be powerful enough to adequately describe the versatile creative artist Arooj Aftab. Rooted in a constellation of insurmountable boundaries and elegant refusals, it moves smoothly against the weight of time and convention, honoring multiple traditions while not allowing itself to be consumed by any of them alone. The artist evades categorical definition through an extensive repertoire of study and knowledge that includes music production and recording techniques as well as a wide-ranging vocal practice that moves with sophisticated intent in the worlds of jazz, classical South Asian music, pop and blues. With and from these living, mercury forms, Aftab works to fashion what she admiringly calls a “global soul.” She is its learned scribe and dark chanteuse who successfully convinces audiences around the world that genre definitions are a lie but that they should believe her.
The full extent of Arooj Aftab's musical legacy shows in her two most recent albums: the Grammy-nominated "masterclass in spatial sound" Love in Exile (Verve, 2023), which she created together with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, and her fourth solo project, the blistering Night Reign (Verve, 2024). Both works are spectacles of their skill, and Aftab guards all their supple elements tenderly and skillfully like priceless heirlooms. Her role models, from Sufi poets to iconic jazz singers, proved to her that "there was no blueprint for what I wanted to do," and it is her willingness to take risks and nonconformity that put Aftab in her place brought him to the forefront of the creative music scene. Since 2021, she has delivered stirring performances at major concerts and internationally renowned festivals such as the Newport Jazz Festival, Coachella, Roskilde Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Glastonbury, and twice on NPR's Tiny Desk Series, and has been featured by the New York Times, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Time Magazine; Arooj Aftab was awarded a Grammy for “Mohabbat” in the “Best Global Music Performance” category and a nomination for “Best New Artist” for her outstanding third album “Vulture Prince” (Verve/New Amsterdam, 2021). She also received two nominations for "Love in Exile" and was selected as a 2023 United States Artists Fellow and recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Music.
Before and behind Aftab's many awards is the instrument itself, her desirable voice, which she describes as an alchemy of "repression, reinvention, exile, chaos, feminism and the crazy web of love, loss and tragedy in the world." The calm in her voice is not one of comfort or approval, but rather a persistent and expectant intensity that sears the lyrics into countless lives in as many countries. Arooj Aftab herself was the subject of various migrations and spent her youth in Lahore, Pakistan, a city with many gardens and also the birthplace of her music-loving parents. Her viral cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", sung at the age of eighteen, helped her study jazz at Berklee College of Music in Boston, while Brooklyn, New York, became her next and most fruitful workshop for the creation of her "world-building" music should be. Night Reign is both a living reflection of this music and its future, which lies in the footsteps of this city. There, Aftab works with some of the most impressive musicians of our time, drawing various concentric circles of collaboration that reflect back to her a cosmic level of musical craft and ingenuity.
Arooj Aftab enchants with her passionate attention to the everyday and her Ability to indelibly shape its stratospheric poetry. She dares to express her affection from the stage, a deeply musical performance that shows not only how to do it, but why to do it. Encouraged by her fearlessness and exquisite imagination, others gather and play along to prove that she is exactly who and where she belongs. “For once, I’m not fighting,” she says with her typical candor. "I already won."
Photo credit: Sherya Dev Dube
10/19/2024
Berlin, home port Neukölln
Entry: 8:00 p.m.
Start: 9:00 p.m.
Tickets are available for €33 plus fee at www.schoneberg.de and at all ticket offices.
► www.aroojaftab.com
🎶 www.bit.ly/4b2ivfh
The word "transformative" may not be powerful enough to adequately describe the versatile creative artist Arooj Aftab. Rooted in a constellation of insurmountable boundaries and elegant refusals, it moves smoothly against the weight of time and convention, honoring multiple traditions while not allowing itself to be consumed by any of them alone. The artist evades categorical definition through an extensive repertoire of study and knowledge that includes music production and recording techniques as well as a wide-ranging vocal practice that moves with sophisticated intent in the worlds of jazz, classical South Asian music, pop and blues. With and from these living, mercury forms, Aftab works to fashion what she admiringly calls a “global soul.” She is its learned scribe and dark chanteuse who successfully convinces audiences around the world that genre definitions are a lie but that they should believe her.
The full extent of Arooj Aftab's musical legacy shows in her two most recent albums: the Grammy-nominated "masterclass in spatial sound" Love in Exile (Verve, 2023), which she created together with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, and her fourth solo project, the blistering Night Reign (Verve, 2024). Both works are spectacles of their skill, and Aftab guards all their supple elements tenderly and skillfully like priceless heirlooms. Her role models, from Sufi poets to iconic jazz singers, proved to her that "there was no blueprint for what I wanted to do," and it is her willingness to take risks and nonconformity that put Aftab in her place brought him to the forefront of the creative music scene. Since 2021, she has delivered stirring performances at major concerts and internationally renowned festivals such as the Newport Jazz Festival, Coachella, Roskilde Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Glastonbury, and twice on NPR's Tiny Desk Series, and has been featured by the New York Times, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Time Magazine; Arooj Aftab was awarded a Grammy for “Mohabbat” in the “Best Global Music Performance” category and a nomination for “Best New Artist” for her outstanding third album “Vulture Prince” (Verve/New Amsterdam, 2021). She also received two nominations for "Love in Exile" and was selected as a 2023 United States Artists Fellow and recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Music.
Before and behind Aftab's many awards is the instrument itself, her desirable voice, which she describes as an alchemy of "repression, reinvention, exile, chaos, feminism and the crazy web of love, loss and tragedy in the world." The calm in her voice is not one of comfort or approval, but rather a persistent and expectant intensity that sears the lyrics into countless lives in as many countries. Arooj Aftab herself was the subject of various migrations and spent her youth in Lahore, Pakistan, a city with many gardens and also the birthplace of her music-loving parents. Her viral cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", sung at the age of eighteen, helped her study jazz at Berklee College of Music in Boston, while Brooklyn, New York, became her next and most fruitful workshop for the creation of her "world-building" music should be. Night Reign is both a living reflection of this music and its future, which lies in the footsteps of this city. There, Aftab works with some of the most impressive musicians of our time, drawing various concentric circles of collaboration that reflect back to her a cosmic level of musical craft and ingenuity.
Arooj Aftab enchants with her passionate attention to the everyday and her Ability to indelibly shape its stratospheric poetry. She dares to express her affection from the stage, a deeply musical performance that shows not only how to do it, but why to do it. Encouraged by her fearlessness and exquisite imagination, others gather and play along to prove that she is exactly who and where she belongs. “For once, I’m not fighting,” she says with her typical candor. "I already won."
Photo credit: Sherya Dev Dube