Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Arooj Aftab’s career has grown gradually, now suddenly. The Riyadh-born, Lahore-raised, Brooklyn-based musician recorded her first album in 2014, followed in 2018 by an essay into contemporary classical. Vulture Prince in 2021 won a Grammy for “Mohabbat”. A trio album with the jazz players Viyay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily followed, so Night Reign is, depending on how you count, either her fourth or her fifth proper album. Vulture Prince came out of a place of grief, for the deaths of her brother Maher and her friend Annie Ali Khan. It was a preternaturally still record, astonishing in its massive, quiet density. Night Reign is looser, even more abandoned; although still a nocturnal album this is a night-time full of possibilities, not a deep dark midnight of the soul. The title hints punningly at Americana, but there are few instances of that. A cover of “Autumn Leaves”, a jazz standard with English lyrics by Johnny Mercer (after Jacques Prévert’s French original) starts with metallic echoing percussion and ends with an exploratory Rhodes solo by James Francies. “I miss you most of all,” sings Aftab, hitting all three descending notes of that last word cleanly without a hint of melisma. “Whiskey”, a song she started at college in Boston two decades ago, swirls intoxicatingly. “We’ll fade into the night on waves of your perfume,” she offers as Maeve Gilchrist’s harp ripples. “I’m drunk and you’re insane.” A reprise of Vulture Prince’s “Last Night”, there a spectral dub, is here wilder, alive with flute from Cautious Clay and Elvis Costello on the Wurlitzer.The title actually stems from Raat Ki Rani, the Pakistani flower known as Queen of the Night; the song of the same name features a slow descending bassline and tasteful AutoTune blurring the edges of Aftab’s alto. Flugelhorn rises like an infusion through “Na Gul”, a setting of the 18th-century writer Mah Laqa Bai’s amorous address to the 16th-century Queen Chand Bibi. Like Vulture Prince, this album insists that you listen to it over and over again.★★★★★‘Night Reign’ is released by Verve
