Vulture Prince is dedicated to Arooj Aftab’s younger brother, who died while she was making it. That fact is not incidental to the album. But it would be a mistake to reduce the record to a grief document — it is too formally considered for that, too clearly a work of artistic decision-making as well as feeling.

The album is built on the ghazal, the classical Urdu poetic form structured around longing and loss. Aftab sings in Urdu. Her accompaniments — harp, bass, spare percussion — create a texture that sits at the edge of several traditions without settling inside any of them. The result is music that many critics have described, accurately, as jazz-adjacent; what they have not always noted is that it is also, equally precisely, something the ghazal tradition has been working toward for centuries.

The Sound

The first thing you notice is space. Vulture Prince is a quiet album — not hushed in the way that ambient music is quiet, but quiet in the way that grief is quiet, the silence between things that have been said and things that cannot be.

Aftab’s voice is a mezzo that sits in the middle register and does not attempt to impress. She is not demonstrating range or technique. She is conveying — and the difference matters more than it might seem. Many vocalists with comparable technical gifts would fill this music with evidence of themselves. Aftab effaces herself into the material, which is the harder and rarer thing.

The harp work of Maeve Gilchrist creates harmonic fields that resonate with both Western classical music and the tanpura drones of South Asian classical tradition. The bass of Petros Klampanis is present but unhurried. The percussion, when it appears, is minimal — a suggestion of rhythm rather than its articulation.

Jazz as Solvent

What connects Vulture Prince to the jazz tradition is not surface — not the swing feel, not the improvised solos — but something more structural. Jazz harmony, at its most interesting, treats chords not as destinations but as environments. You can be inside a chord the way you can be inside a room. You can move through it in more than one direction.

Aftab uses this principle to open the ghazal form. Traditional ghazal is built on returning — the ghazal poem always circles back to its radif, its repeated refrain. Aftab’s arrangements create harmonic progressions that circle and hover rather than resolve, which means the longing at the core of the ghazal never quite lands. It stays suspended. The music enacts what the lyrics describe.

This is formal sophistication of a high order, executed with what sounds like complete naturalness.

Where the Competition Stopped

Pitchfork’s review of this album is thoughtful but ultimately treats Vulture Prince as a record that successfully bridges genres — as if the achievement were primarily taxonomic. The Wire did not cover it. JazzTimes filed no review.

What is missing from the existing coverage is a serious engagement with Aftab as a composer. The arrangements on Vulture Prince are not ambient mood music; they are carefully constructed formal arguments about how different musical traditions can intersect without any of them losing their identity. The ghazal does not become jazz. The jazz does not consume the ghazal. They make contact at the level of structure, and what emerges is genuinely new.

The Album as a Whole

“Mohabbat” opens with bare voice and harp. The word means love in Urdu. The treatment makes it sound like memory. “Saans Lo” — breathe — is the emotional centre of the record: Aftab’s voice against minimal accompaniment, a piece that earns its simplicity. The closing “Suroor” circles back to the longing the album has been inhabiting and leaves it unresolved, which is the only honest ending available.

Vulture Prince won the Grammy for Best Global Music Performance in 2023, a category that is at once a recognition and a limitation — it places the album in a world music box that its formal ambitions exceed. The record does not belong to world music. It belongs to the long tradition of artists who found that grief required a new form to contain it, and built one.