SADA release 1st in a series of live recordings.

SADA’s live recording of ‘Kaleidoscope’ is out today on all streaming platforms, and it opens this Friday’s update of the Jazz In Europe New Jazz & More playlist on Spotify. The video was released earlier this month. What arrives on the platforms today is a remastered version of that recording, the first of three live tracks the German-Syrian sextet is putting out ahead of their studio album ‘Echoes of Maqam’, due this autumn on Neuklang Records.

‘Kaleidoscope’ is the first of SADA’s live tracks to reach the streaming platforms. When we featured the band last year, guitarist Matthias Kurth described their concerts as a recreation of the music each night, and this recording catches one of those performances. With the remaster, the audio from the video is now available to stream on its own.

The recording goes back to April 2025, when the six musicians met at Kulturhaus Käfertal in Mannheim for a short live video shoot of new material. ‘Kaleidoscope’, composed by Kurth, is one of the pieces from those few days. The band kept most of the production in its own hands. Drummer Konrad Wiemann recorded and mixed the audio, as well as adding sound effects to the track, and trumpeter Johannes Stange cut and edited the video. Zacharias Zschenderlein developed the video concept and filmed the session.

Mohamad Fityan | Photo by Torsten Redler.

On ‘Kaleidoscope’ the Syrian ney player Mohamad Fityan and kanun player Laila Ta-Mah sit alongside Kurth on guitar, Stange on trumpet, Jonathan Sell on bass and Wiemann on drums. The band describes the result as “a sonic bridge between jazz-rock and Middle Eastern tradition.” Fityan was born in Aleppo in 1984, graduated from the Higher Institute of Music in Damascus in 2010 and first came to Germany on tour in 2006. For years the group performed under his name. In 2023 it slimmed down from eight players to six, brought in Ta-Mah and became SADA, the Arabic word for “echo”. The band has said the new name reflects how far it has grown beyond a project led by one soloist.

Kurth came to the band with the background this music asks for. He joined after the death of founding guitarist Jörg Teichert in a road accident, and his experience with fretless and quarter-tone instruments lets the guitar follow the quarter-tone intervals of the maqam melodies. Writing a piece for ney, kanun and trumpet over a jazz-rock rhythm section asks for exactly that kind of knowledge, and it’s good to hear the German members of the band writing from inside the tradition as well as the Syrian ones.

‘Echoes of Maqam’ was recorded at Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg, whose own label, Neuklang, will release it. The title points to the maqam, the modal system of Arabic music in which each mode carries its own melodic rules and its own mood. The three live tracks give an early look at the band’s new material before the studio album appears. ‘Lange Nacht’ and ‘Tarantl’ will follow ‘Kaleidoscope’ over the coming weeks, each with a video on YouTube and on the streaming platforms where the format allows it.

You can hear ‘Kaleidoscope’ now on all streaming platforms, and it sits at the top of this week’s New Jazz & More playlist on Spotify.

For more on the band’s background, including Fityan’s road from Aleppo to Germany, our feature SADA: Echoes Across Borders is still online.

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