Tu Jhoom

Abida Parveen's "Tu Jhoom" — "You Dance" — is addressed at a level of address that requires some orientation: she is not singing to a beloved in the romantic sense but in the Sufi sense, which is to say she is addressing the divine in the second person with a directness that mystics reserve for states of advanced intimacy. The instruction to dance is an instruction to exist fully, to let the divine movement within each thing manifest rather than be suppressed. Parveen's voice on this recording has the quality of something that has been burning for a very long time and is no longer concerned with managing its temperature. She is among the few living singers who can sustain devotional music's most demanding requirement: that it be actually meant. The production is fuller than many of her recordings, incorporating a contemporary sonic frame without diluting the classical Sindhi and Punjabi Sufi roots. There are passages where her voice seems to leave the song's formal structure and become something else — not improvisation exactly, but a kind of falling forward that the song's structure catches and returns her from. The most attentive listening reveals how carefully planned these apparent moments of abandon actually are.