INTERVIEW: Baklava Express returns with ‘Sabába’
Baklava Express, the Brooklyn based musical group led by oud player Josh Kaye, is back with a second album. Sabába will be released Friday, April 17, and concerts to celebrate the recording are scheduled from April 24 to May 30 in the Northeast.
“I’m super proud of what we’ve done with this record,” Kaye said in a recent phone interview. “It’s a little bit different from the first in that we have a few more musicians who’ve joined the fold, namely Eren Erdogan on ney and kaval, which is like a Turkish flute, and Lefteris Bournias on clarinet, so I think this gives the whole feel a slightly more Mediterranean sound than the first record.”
When Baklava Express made its first record in 2021, that iteration of the group had been not been together for too long, and then they headed into the studio. This iteration of Kaye’s band has much more history together.
“We’ve been playing together years, and I think you can really hear that,” he said. “On the record, you can hear how much tighter it is, how much more comfortable we are, how much more room there is to breathe in a certain regard. It was a much easier process in the studio, I think.”
Baklava Express musicians pride themselves on promoting diversity when it comes to musical, cultural and regional artistry. They pull from many different traditions in southern Europe and the Middle East for a wholly unique sound.
“We’re really influenced by the music of the Arab world, of Turkey, of southern Europe like Greece and Spain, flamenco, music from Armenia, and there’s a degree to which I think fans of those specific kinds of music or people from those cultural backgrounds can hear themselves represented in different ways,” Kaye said. “But hopefully it’s in a way that these things all do melt together. They’re cohesive. No one is standing on anyone’s toes, as it were. No one is taking up too much or too little. It is, in a sense, a love letter to the whole Mediterranean and Middle East. This is such a special part of the world for me.”
Kaye holds court as the oud player; for the unbeknownst, this is a stringed instrument that looks like a pear-shaped guitar. Other instruments in the band include violin, guitar, bass and percussion.
“We have people in the band who both are and are not devotees or students of these styles of music or who themselves are from these parts of the world,” Kaye said. “There’s kind of a beauty in the fact that not everyone has to be from these particular regions to still get this nice, cohesive sound.”
Kaye added: “For example, I said we have some new players on this record, so we have Eren Erdogan and Lefteris Bournias. So they are respectively from Turkey and Greece, so they are very steeped in those particular traditions. But then we have someone like Daisy Castro, who is our violinist. She’s from the States. She’s from Baltimore, and while she studied briefly in Greece some of this style, she has very much an American sound with her violin in terms of timbre and tone. But it works very well. We have James Robbins on bass, who is a really fantastic and in-demand jazz bass player in New York City, so he’s not really coming from the eastern standpoint at all. He’s coming from very much a western musical background. It blends together really nicely, I think.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Baklava Express’ new album, Sabába, will be released Friday, April 17. The band will play several Northeast concerts from April 24 to May 30. Click here for more information and tickets.
