The soft Sufi chant of “hey hele hey hoo” calls to the beloved, washing over an eclectic texture of the tār’s traditional melodies, the cello’s classical sonorities, and the guitar’s harmonic clusters. This fusion is the core sound of the Zendeh Delan ensemble, a contemporary Europe-based Sufi music group within the MTO Shahmaghsoudi School of Islamic Sufism. While on the surface departing from colloquial notions of “Sufi music,” these hybrid sonorities on the album Melodies of Unity (2022), are in fact intimately rooted in Sufi praxis. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and collaborative performance ethnography since 2021, I show how the group’s eclectic style is deeply rooted in a continuity of Sufi principles that guide and structure their creative process. I outline how interlocutors’ practices of dhikr (remembrance) and samā (listening) engender a radically inclusive creative process that privileges meaningfully distinct principles of harmony (wahdat), service (khidmat), presence of heart (hūzūr-e qalb), and oneness (tohid) over concepts of style, notions of authenticity, and/or genre. My interviews, and collaboration in rehearsals and performance reveal how these principles foster a creative space that embraces their diverse musical backgrounds while creating potential for both individuality and their blending into a unique whole. This case study contributes to ethnomusicological scholarship on Sufism that has explored sama and dhikr through readings of medieval texts–respectively Al-Ghazali, Hujwiri, Baqli, and Suhrawardi (Rouget 1985, Lewisohn 1997, Becker 2004, During 2010)–by exploring their application among students of Sufism who perform new musics in contemporary diasporic contexts.

Throughout a multi-year ethnographic study of intercultural collaborations in jazz, multiple interlocutors have referenced Sufi performance, philosophical, and spiritual practices in response to my questions about their individual and collective experiences during improvised music-making. Glossing their references through what one interlocutor describes as the “virtuosities and invocations of jazz,” I highlight how they deal constructively and creatively with gaps in translation across linguistic, musical, and epistemological boundaries, especially related to reconciling studied and intuitive approaches to successful “community-based art-making.” After outlining historical connections between Sufism and jazz, I ground this presentation in three case studies: flautist Jamie Baum, percussionist Sunny Jain, and the Sélébéyone project. During workshops for the second Sélébéyone recording, rappers Gaston Bandimic and HPrizm—who don't speak a shared language—noticed that they both referenced the Sufi concept "al ghaib" in their improvised lyrics. That album (2022) was then titled Xaybu: The Unseen, referencing both Wolof and English translations of "al ghaib" and the kinships that had developed through shared sonic and spiritual experience despite linguistic and cultural differences. In this presentation, I will contextualize my interlocutors’ engagements with Sufi practices within existing scholarship on Islam and the African Diaspora in jazz studies (e.g. Chase 2010), and on global popular musics (e.g. Gaind-Krishnan 2020). Based on these examples, I will provide insight into phenomenologies of felt experience, the dynamic bonds of emergent kinship, discursive and intercultural politics of vibration, and the import of responsive methodologies attentive to both the virtuosic and invocational aspects of music-making.

While touring in the Spring of 2025, Pakistani American vocalist/composer Arooj Aftab joked that her listeners were “either crying or meditating” alongside her music. Indeed, Aftab’s sound seems to tap into a certain zeitgeist of global overwhelm and desolation in the post-Covid era. Her vocal timbre is round and immersive—and eschews complex textual and melodic forms of ornamentation traditionally highlighted in subcontinental musicking. South Asian listeners steeped in the Sufi-inspired ghazal repertoires of the 20th century note that Aftab’s renditions tend to be “simple” or “emotionally flat.” Heard against this backdrop, Aftab’s sonic grammar is affectively attenuated, placing it in sharp relief to the techniques of ecstasy-inducing South Asian Sufi music practices. This paper will argue that Aftab’s sonic aesthetic is intentionally crafted as a form of neo-Sufi expression that lifts off from traditional forms. Her recent collaboration with guitarist Gyan Riley—son of minimalist composer Terry Riley—situates her attenuated expressive range within a lineage of art music that turns on notions of immersion and simplicity as innovative practice. Shifting the frame of analysis toward minimalist aesthetics, then, this paper explores points of contact with concepts rooted in South Asian Sufi philosophies of sound, while analyzing Aftab’s compositional strategies in light of minimalist aesthetics. Pairing close readings of recent live recordings with interviews and digital archival materials, this paper will theorize ways that Aftab’s music transduces aspects of Sufi philosophy into a minimalist sonic landscape that resonates on the plane of affect with the state of the world in 2025.