There is still that evocative quality to her music. Fast forward a little more than 15 years later and you can notice the difference in her voice - now well-practised, more powerful, more in tune as an artist, she sounds surer of herself. Her covers of Jeff Buckley’s 'Hallelujah' and Aamir Zaki’s 'Mera Pyaar' had an unplugged, raw, dark and hauntingly beautiful quality to them. Listening to 'Mohabbat', I’m taken back to when Arooj Aftab first hit the airwaves - on the radio on City FM89 in the early 2000s along with independent releases online on SoundCloud. The track has managed to get attention from high places in her adopted country: 'Mohabbat' has also been listed by Barack Obama as one of his favourite songs from his summer playlist for 2021. I’m not entirely sure if this kind of new age experimentation would strike a chord with audiences back home. Arooj Aftab is currently based in New York, a melting pot of different cultures, and it provides her with both the environment needed to do the kind of music she wants to and the audience for it. 'Mohabbat' is from her latest album, Vulture Prince, where she experiments ‘fearlessly’ with South Asian sounds. It’s a beautiful, minimalist, unplugged track that is haunting both for its ambient sound as well as Arooj’s elongated vocalisations of longing and separation.Īrooj Aftab is far away from home but connecting with her desi roots by reinventing and reimagining how South Asian music can be done While other instrumentation is gently introduced into different sections of the song, the sound structure largely remains the same as it was when the song started. I’m taking something that’s really old and pulling it into the now,” said the artist in a recent interview to Pitchfork an online music magazine. It’s very difficult to do this, it has taken a lot of time and energy as a musician, so it’s not a ******* cover. “People ask, ‘Is this an interpolation? Is this song a cover?’ No, it’s not. But she makes the song entirely her own and the rendition is very much a modern one that has Arooj’s signature ambient sound.
#Youtube farida khanum ghazals full#
Whereas Mehdi Hasan sang five couplets and Farida sang four from the ghazal (the full ghazal has nine couplets), Arooj limits herself to only three couplets. Yes, it’s the famous ghazal by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri rendered to great acclaim by the likes of Mehdi Hasan and Farida Khanum.