Together with Kayah, we invite you to an exotic journey. Transoriental Orchestra is an extraordinary project. It all began with Kayah’s great love for the world music. The artist has long planned to record an album in this style. The invitation to Kayah to a performance at the Singer's Warsaw Festival was for her an impetus to start working on the material. A special project, Transoriental Orchestra, was created for the purpose of this single concert.
Kayah invited Atanas Valkov, a film composer and music producer to cooperate with her. Together, they selected for the project outstanding instrumentalists and soloists of Polish, Ukrainian and Iranian origin, which further enhances the musical dialogue and gives the project an authentically multicultural character. Among the band's instruments, there are some unprecedented instruments ones, such as cymbals, santoor, oud, saz, lutes, flutes, pipes and more. The T.O. repertoire is a huge challenge. The disc offers Jewish songs from different regions of Europe and the Middle East. This geographical diversity is obviously reflected in music, where the Balkan, Persian, Slavic, African and, of course, Jewish sounds can be distinguished. Kayah had to face a number of different languages – she is singing in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino and Arabic.
Kayah about the Transoriental Orchestra project:
I was delighted when I got invited to the Singer’s Warsaw Festival. It was the beginning of a great adventure. An adventure that resulted in a disc – Transoriental Orchestra. This album is my return to ethnic music and the World Music movement, which was always my area of interest; my cooperation with Goran Bregovic, Cesaria Evora or Vera Bila brought me lot of success. This time I am not investigating the Balkan, African or Gypsy areas, but I am using the wonderful legacy of Jews from all over the world.
By selecting songs, I wanted to show their migration as well as the influence that foreign cultures had on their creativity. The album contains songs from both the Sephardic Jews and our local Ashkenazi Jews. Hence the multitude of languages that can be heard on the disc, as I sing in Ladino, Arabic, Macedonian, Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish. As usual, the fate let me to be surrounded by a group of fantastic musicians, passionate about exotic instruments, true enthusiasts from various sides of the world. The international composition of our orchestra consists of people from Persia, Ukraine or Bulgaria. Atanas Valkov, a well-known producer of film music, is looking after the whole project. Our concert at the Singer's Warsaw Festival met with a fantastic reception and remained a great memory and inspiration for us.
The album that was created to meet my dreams and I can’t wait for the concerts promoting it! It turned out that the idea of musical cross-section of the Jewish migration is very innovative and connects many nations as well as ethnic groups. I recommend this disc to all those who loved my cooperation with Bregovic, as well as to those who love travelling, at least in a musical way, because thanks to our sounds they will be able to do so, without moving from their place.
