With Love in Exile, musicians Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily conjure their own shimmering, time-stretching universe
Performing at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival, the New York City trio has bonded “accidentally” through virtuosity and empathy
Shahzad Ismaily, Vijay Iyer, and Arooj Aftab. Photo by Ebru Yildiz
The Vancouver International Jazz Festival presents Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily at the Vancouver Playhouse on June 26
IF YOU’RE LOOKING for a respite from the world—and who isn’t?—let me do you a favour.
Go immediately to your favourite streaming service and listen to Love in Exile, the debut recording from the New York City–based trio of singer Arooj Aftab, pianist Vijay Iyer, and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily. Over 75 minutes and seven mostly longish compositions, the three create a universe that shimmers with currents of sustained loveliness, moving from dark to light and back again with measured intelligence, subtle virtuosity, and some of the most masterful listening you’ll ever hear.
Then go buy some physical product so that Aftab, Iyer, and Ismaily will be encouraged to craft a follow-up.
What might be most wonderful about Love in Exile is that while it sounds like a polished studio creation, it isn’t. For all that it’s sometimes reminiscent of the cut-and-splice masterpieces Teo Macero created out of Miles Davis’s live takes, especially the hushed and dreamlike “In a Silent Way”, it was more or less freely improvised in real time. And the magic is repeatable: in a recent live-on-air performance for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series (see below), the three musicians proved that their sound is based less on technology than on real human empathy.
Iyer had a hunch this might be the case, and was delighted to find out that he was right when he convened the trio for what was initially supposed to be a festival one-off.
“We’ve all known each other for quite a while,” he says, interviewed in a four-way Zoom chat with Aftab and Ismaily. “I met Arooj in 2016, I think it was, through a mutual colleague and collaborator. And I met Shahzad around the time I moved to New York in the early 2000s. We got to play together a few times here and there, and then in 2018 I had a chance to curate some performances in New York at the Kitchen, an experimental music-and-arts venue here. I wanted to bring people together who I knew could just channel together, and I understood that they were both exceptional listeners and could co-create largely without rehearsal. So that’s sort of what happened, but it goes beyond the fact that it just kind of happened. When it happened, it was just amazing. We surprised ourselves; that’s how special it felt. So here we are!”
Aftab concurs, pointing out that she hadn’t expected such time-stretching delicacy from Iyer, one of the most virtuosic piano technicians in improvised music, or Ismaily, who’s best known for straddling the worlds of tock and improv through his collaborations with artists such as Feist, Yoko Ono, and Secret Chiefs 3.
“I don’t think that they stretched time so much in their earlier work. It’s like they were these monster shredders!” she says, which prompts general laughter. “But I do think that all three of us individually have this magical ability to kind of.. what’s the word? To disturb the perception of time. Individually each person has this, but in the three of us coming together it has become a really strong thing in what we do that no-one actually planned. It’s like three people with the same superpower are in the same room by accident, and it’s a very powerful effect.”
Arooj Aftab. Photo by Diana Markosian
If there’s a name for this superpower, it’s likely empathy. There’s an obvious bond between the three musicians in that they’re brown people in a musical world—jazz, for want of a better term—usually populated by black and white. They don’t dwell on this, but recognize that it’s a factor.
“One thing that does take place, particularly as we travel, is we get a chance to very, very gently share the filter of the world we’re walking in,” says Ismaily, who has a wonderfully metaphorical way of seeing the world. “For example, let’s say three parents meet at a coffeeshop across the street from a playground. All of those parents are going to, without saying it to each other, take note that the playground is right across the street. But if three 20-year-olds meet for coffee across the street from a playground, it’s possible none of them will see it, or talk about it, or take any notice of it whatsoever, because it’s not part of their life landscape. And so there are some nice ways in which, when we travel, I think the three of us feel like we’re inhabiting the same world, or a similar world. Whether verbally or non-verbally, we’re taking note of or remarking on similar things—and that has a comfort in it.”
More important than their shared South Asian heritage, all three suggest, is that they’ve each experienced a degree of cultural displacement, whether first- or second-hand. Born in Albany, New York to Tamil parents, Iyer was trained as a classical violinist and then studied physics at the doctoral level before pursuing his love of improvised music. Ismaily’s parents were Pakistani, but he was also born in the U.S. Of the three, Aftab might be the most peripatetic: born to Pakistani parents in Saudi Arabia, she returned to Pakistan as a child and then headed to the United States to study jazz singing at Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 2005. (Her studies paid off; Aftab won a 2022 Grammy Award for her third solo album Vulture Prince.) “Home” can be elusive to those of such diverse backgrounds, but music might be one place where it can be found.
“I feel that’s definitely right, and I’ve been enjoying that,” Ismaily says. “When the name was first suggested, Love in Exile, maybe I thought of it as just like an accidental beauty of poetic language, but then as we’ve done some interviews and I’ve heard Vijay and Arooj speak about it and have considered it myself, it’s become so profoundly touching to me, the name of the band and the idea that when you go through exile, even though it’s a generation behind you, you receive all that stuff epigenetically. There are some schisms and some wounds to heal, and I do feel it takes place musically. And at the very least it takes place when you’re with two other people who have shared some experiences. In talking to one another and in embracing each other by playing music together, there’s a reintegrating of community. I’m imagining the visual of bones that are re-knitting themselves after a break.”
“That’s beautifully put, Shahzad,” Aftab responds. “I think that ‘home’ is so predominantly and frequently what is at the core of many musics, as in music as spiritual practice and finding oneself and kind of soothing oneself—which is how I feel about music. And so home has always been in conversation with my work, especially in the context of being from Pakistan, being a contemporary musician who has never studied any South Asian classical music, and who writes from a minimalist and jazz idiom or language but fuses many things together….As someone who is often termed ‘Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab’, or whatever, where we’re from is a subject that has broad and subtle and secretive meanings inside of conversation and music, because nobody lets us forget that we look like our home isn’t where we think it is, or some weird thing.”
So it’s lovely, they all concur, that they’ve found shared terrain in a musical idiom that allows for both deep communion and individual expression.
“I just want to add that we made this ’cause we liked it,” Iyer says, returning to the band’s recorded debut. “And we liked it more than we expected to, which is why we put it out and why we’re going to the lengths of touring. There was never anything calculated in this; it’s almost like we found it by accident. But we believe in it, too.”
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