Transformative may not be an urgent enough word to describe the multi-hyphenate creative Arooj Aftab. Rooted to a constellation of unmappable margins and elegant refusals, she lithely moves against the weight of time and convention, honoring multiple traditions while being owned by none. She eludes categorical capture through an expansive repertoire of study, including the techniques of music production and engineering as well a sprawling vocal practice that moves with cunning intention through and alongside jazz, South Asian classical music, pop, and blues. With and from these living, mercurial forms Aftab labors in design of something that she adoringly refers to as “global soul.” She is its erudite scribe and dark chanteuse, successfully convincing audiences all over the world that genres are a lie but she should be believed.
 
The scale of Aftab’s musical inheritances are on brilliant display in her two most recent albums: the Grammy-nominated “masterclass in space” Love in Exile (Verve, 2023), co-created with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, and her fourth solo project, the incandescent Night Reign (Verve, 2024). Both are spectacles in skill and Aftab tenderly, expertly holds all of their supple elements like priceless heirlooms. Her seeking, from Sufi poets to iconic jazz vocalists, proved to her that “there was no blueprint for this thing I wanted to do,” and it’s for her embrace of risk and nonconformity that Aftab earned her position at the vanguard of creative music. Since 2021, she has delivered “rapturous performances” at major venues and international festivals such as the Newport Jazz Festival, Coachella, Roskilde Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Glastonbury, and twice on NPR’s Tiny Desk series; received critical praise from The New York Times, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Time Magazine; and been awarded a Grammy for “Mohabbat” in the Best Global Music Performance category and a Best New Artist nomination for her standout third album, Vulture Prince (Verve/New Amsterdam, 2021), two nominations for Love in Exile, as well as her selection as a 2023 United States Artists Fellow and recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Music.
 
Before and beyond Aftab’s many accolades is the instrument itself, her craveable voice, which she describes as an alchemy of “displacement, reinvention, exile, chaos, feminism and the maddening fabric of love and loss and tragedy in the world.” The calm in her vocal delivery is not comfort or consent but a persistent and expectant intensity that sears the text to countless lifetimes in as many lands. Herself the subject of various migrations, Aftab spent her adolescent years in Lahore, Pakistan, a garden-dense city and the birthplace of her music-loving parents. Her viral cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” at age eighteen aided in her passage to study jazz at Berklee College of Music in Boston, while Brooklyn, New York would be her next and most fertile workshop for creation of her “world-building” music. Night Reign is both a vivid reflection of and future for that music held by the trace figurations of the city. There Aftab works with some of the most stunning musicians of our time, raising diverse concentric circles of collaboration that reflect back to her a cosmic level of musical craft and invention.
 
Aftab enchants with her passionate attention to the everyday and ability to indelibly shape its stratospheric poesis. She dares to express affection from the stage, a profoundly musical achievement that models not only how to do so but why. Emboldened by her fearlessness and exquisite imagination, others gather and play, proving that she’s exactly who and where she is meant to be. “For once, I’m not fighting,” she says with signature candor. “I’ve already won.”
 
Shana L. Redmond
New York City
January 5, 2024
 

Zsela (ZHAY-la) knows that artistic arrivals take time. The ambitious artist emerges with Big For You — a debut album that is raw, vulnerable, and a force to be reckoned with. Produced alongside close collaborators Daniel Aged (Frank Ocean, Kelela) and Gabe Wax (The War On Drugs, Soccer Mommy), Zsela’s first full-length album flows between grandiosity and intimacy to build a sonic landscape overflowing with introspection.

With the release of Ache of Victory in 2020 — a five-track EP that The New York Times praised as “emotive yet elusive, slow but infused with undulating motion, at once earthy and otherworldly” — Zsela established herself as a singer-songwriter of cavernous depth. Big For You is a quantum leap for an artist who has taken giant strides as a performer in the years since her inaugural release, having graced stages like Carnegie Hall and MoMA PS1 in New York and the Natural History Museums in New York and Los Angeles.

Reflecting on the making of the album’s ten songs, Zsela explains that the initial sketches went through countless versions before evolving to their final forms. “It was important for me to stay open in this process, finding the truth of what the songs want to be,” says Zsela. “That meant breaking them down and building them back up again and again, not being precious and trying to listen.” By stripping back to the truth of these songs, Zsela arrived at sonic settings that are striking in their contrast, using negative space to conjure a grander sense of scale. This negative space also casts a spotlight on Zsela’s voice — a confident presence that anchors the lyrical weight of her compositions.

Dripping with rich textural treatments and amorphous, heart-on-the-sleeve arrangements, the dynamics and diversity that define Big For You prove Zsela is painting with a wider palette than ever before. In the artist’s words, the guiding undercurrent across this cycle of songs is heartbreak. Meditating on the album’s title, Zsela notes, “At the heart, it touches on the causal versus intentional dance we play between being ‘full of you’ and ‘full for you’ — the complexity and magnitude of the space we take and fill up for love.”

In addition to Big For You’s core production trio, the album features cameos from several members of Zsela’s extended family of collaborators, from Marc Ribot, Nick Hakim, and Casey MQ to Jasper Marsalis (Slauson Malone 1) and more. The duality of endless studio experimentation and weighty subject matter runs thick throughout the album, where playful production stands in stark contrast with lyrical heartache.

As a full length opening statement, Big For You emphasizes the expansive tension and release of a journey rather than its destination, one that the artist herself has compared to “trying to welcome uncertainty like a warm embrace.” It is the work of a sonic storyteller who has settled into a groove of her own, unafraid to ask unanswered questions.

Zsela’s debut album, Big For You, is out June 14th, 2024 on Mexican Summer.