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It's 2024 and damn Arooj, you've become cool, at parties nobody used to notice you, now everyone's there buttering you up. In 2021 "Vulture Prince" changed your life, first it made it onto an Obama playlist, then it won a Grammy, world music section. Meanwhile, "Night Reign", your new album, just came out, and I have to say it's pretty awesome and the track you do with Moor Mother is really holy shit. But if you're looking for a place to hang the hat of sadness, here we are somewhere else. Who do you think I am, you ask, a damn female guru or a pale, wan angelic maiden? Well, if that were the case, you'd be really off course, I like to curse, drink whiskey, and behave like a freaking idiot.
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I leave the house, get in the car, and put on Vulture Prince, a moment later I'm stopped at the traffic light and from the window escapes a blend of harp and guitar, quite hypnotic stuff and rather Middle Eastern, then comes the atmospheric puff of a jazz flugelhorn and Arooj's voice which is freaking magical. A few seconds pass and beside me is some crappy music blasted quite loud, coming from a car with three young guys looking rough and tough inside, so I blast mine loud as well, aristocratic finesse (so to speak) versus vulgar populace (so to speak). We look at each other and I start to laugh, the diversity of our music tastes seems funny to me, while the look of the three is more like "what's this crap, church stuff?". Then the three look inside my car stuffed with all sorts of oddities I use for my theater workshops, there are teddy bears, skeins of yarn, lamps, broken toys, art magazines, books, basically a freakin' bazaar. I keep smiling and, damn, after a while they start smiling too, maybe it's something like "look at this fool", or maybe they just don't know what to make of it all.
Green light and away from the madding crowd, the hills await, a classic destination for me. I pass by the curve of Rivazza, take Via Goccianello, arrive at the Tre Monti, then choose the strategic spot to stop the car. The sky is clear, the colors are vibrant like after rain, and the clouds seem a gentle joke, a half-impressionist, half-electricity idyll in the air. Sure, this would be a night-time album, meaning when it's dark a scent is stronger, but it doesn't matter, Arooj sings in a way that even a hole becomes a place of the soul. And, as the harp lights up with shining dots in a kind of enchanting dribble, I stretch out on the grass and close my eyes. "We thought wine rained in the rainy season, when it rained, the rain broke my heart," at least that's what Google Translator says...
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Is it jazz? Is it folk? Is it atmospheric lounge? Is it ethnic stuff? Is it esoteric fluff? Is it church stuff? And how would I know? When you're faced with an alien object, definitions are all a bit laughable. So let's just say (one) that this album goes through the narrow door and (two) that the narrow door leads right there. The voice is a wanderer whose steps don’t touch the ground, the music a fragrant ether, and the scent is the kind that makes your head spin a bit, something like "ginger, seasonal fruit, plum, oak, Pakistan in the nineties, fire worship, empty space, and Prince's Purple Rain". And the scent actually exists, Arooj had it made by a friend asking to follow the coordinates I quoted. If you want, you can buy it on Bandcamp or something like that.
And anyway, it all started with the harp and the harp is too beautiful, isn't it? So beautiful it becomes annoying. What you need to do then is add darkness, play strange chords, flirt with a slight displacement. Getting out of the obvious is always the first rule of cool girls. In fact, the album wasn't supposed to be like this, but something more daring and danceable, only then death stuck its oar in and Arooj ditched most of the percussion and pulled out this kind of ethereal blues, whatever that means.
Meanwhile, splendor on the grass, with a hint of guitar and a whisper of synth, the voice brushes the edge that leads to tears. "Gather the broken pieces of the heart and breathe, in this desolate place there is no one but you." And you don't know if it's peace, you don't know if it's pain, because maybe it's both.
Except for one track in English, the album is sung in Urdu, a language that comes "from another part of the mouth", maybe that's why the voice resembles a breath. Ah, Arooji, you put everything in here: the Arab world of your childhood, the Pakistan of early youth, Sufi poetry, Boston's Jazz school, and the New York where you became a brainiac. A hybrid where the fire enters the empty space of the night, and pain becomes a good energy. In short, a freaking wonder... Trallalla...
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