Souren Baronian, born in 1930 in New York City of Armenian parentage, grew up in Spanish Harlem surrounded by music, especially the sounds of Middle Eastern music, jazz and Latin genres. Barely a teenager, he would sneak into the jazz clubs on 52nd Street and listen to Bird and Diz and the other great musicians of the day. His greatest early inspiration was the "Prez," Lester Young. He later studied for many years with the legendary jazz teacher Lennie Tristano and was at the same time mentored on the G-clarinet by the extraordinary Turkish master Safet Gundeger, who was then playing in the 8th Avenue clubs in "Greek Town" during the peak of New York's Middle Eastern music scene in the 1950s, another of Souren's main haunts. Souren is solidly rooted in both Middle Eastern/Balkan idioms and jazz, and may have been the first to create a "fusion" of these two genres in the late 1950s, long before "world music" swept the globe.
Many familiar guest musicians including Polly Tapia Ferber, Adam Good, Rowan Storm, Paul Brown and more.