August 2026

There is a moment on Promises — the 2021 collaboration between Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra — where everything stills. Sanders breathes a single phrase into his tenor saxophone, and it hangs there, suspended between the electronic hum and the strings, like smoke finding the light. I have returned to that moment more times than I can count, and each time it undoes me a little differently.

This is what the greatest art does. It refuses to be the same thing twice.

Pharoah Sanders came from the fire tradition — he studied under John Coltrane, made records that shook the walls of the jazz canon in the late 1960s. His sound has always carried that particular weight of someone who has lived inside music rather than merely practiced it. And yet here, in his eighties, in what would become one of his final recordings before his passing in 2022, there is an extraordinary quality of arrival rather than departure.

Sam Shepherd — Floating Points — built the album's architecture from patient, luminous electronic textures. No flash, no ego. The production serves the breath, the phrase, the silence. This kind of restraint is its own form of brilliance.

What moves me most is how Promises collapses time. You feel jazz's ancient grief and its radical openness simultaneously. The LSO strings are not decoration — they are weather. They change the emotional climate of every room they enter.

If you have never spent forty-six minutes letting one piece of music reshape your interior landscape, I would offer this album as your first experiment. Put away your phone. Lie down if you can. Let Sanders find you.

Some music asks you to listen. This music asks you to become a listener again, as if for the first time.

#jazz #music #Pharoah Sanders #musiclover

There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of Arooj Aftab's Vulture Prince, when the room stops being a room. It happened on a Tuesday evening last spring — the record was on low, half-listened to while I was reading, and then suddenly I wasn't reading anymore. I was somewhere else entirely, suspended in a space between grief and tenderness that I hadn't known music could map so precisely.

Aftab's work defies easy categorization, which is exactly why it demands attention. Born in Pakistan, trained in Boston, based in New York, she draws from Urdu classical traditions, jazz harmony, and minimal ambient production in ways that feel inevitable rather than experimental. Vulture Prince was written in the wake of her brother's death, and that loss shapes every note — not as melodrama, but as something more patient and more devastating: the ordinary persistence of grief in a beautiful world.

The opener, "Baghon Mein," begins with her voice unaccompanied, then gradually gathers orchestration around itself like light accumulating at dawn. By the time the strings arrive, you've been lulled into a vulnerability you didn't quite prepare for. This is the album's essential movement: it earns its emotional weight slowly, without announcing its intentions.

What moves me most is how Aftab treats silence. The space between phrases is never empty — it breathes, it waits, it holds everything the melody just said. In an era defined by sonic maximalism, this restraint feels almost radical. Almost brave.

She isn't asking you to admire her grief. She's inviting you to sit inside it for a while, and find your own.

If you haven't listened yet, find an hour, find a quiet room, and let Vulture Prince find you.

#music #worldmusic #aroojaftab #jazzcritic

There is a moment, somewhere between the third and fourth track, when a record stops being background music and becomes the room itself. I found that moment again last night with Arooj Aftab's Vulture Prince — a record I have returned to more times than I can count, and one that continues to give.

Aftab's voice enters without ceremony. No dramatic build, no introductory flourish. Just sound, unhurried and certain, as if the music had always been present and we are simply now paying attention. She works in a tradition — South Asian classical, Sufi devotional music — but she does not wear that tradition as costume. It breathes through her arrangements the way ancestry breathes through a face: recognizable, defining, and entirely her own.

What strikes me most, returning to this album on a warm August evening, is how grief and beauty are made inseparable here. Vulture Prince was dedicated to her late brother, and that loss is present on every track — not as spectacle, but as weight. The harp lines, played with extraordinary restraint, carry something they cannot name. The silences between notes feel earned rather than empty.

There is a generosity in art that refuses to explain itself. Aftab does not tell you how to feel. She builds a room of sound — candlelit, unhurried — and invites you to sit in it. Whether you bring sorrow or gratitude or simply the exhaustion of a Sunday evening, the music meets you there.

This is what I keep returning for: not answers, but company.

If you have not yet spent an evening with this album, I am genuinely envious of you — the first listen is something you cannot repeat. But the tenth listen is its own gift entirely.

#music #AroojAftab #worldmusic #artscritic