A Sephardic exile’s road from Granada to Constantinople becomes Al Tayr Ensemble’s debut album

Some of the most enduring music ever made in Spain left the country on foot. When the Jews of Castile and Aragon were ordered out at the end of the fifteenth century, their songs went with them, and for generations they were sung in Ladino around the Ottoman Mediterranean, long after the kingdom that expelled them had forgotten them. Al Tayr Ensemble, a young Spanish early-music trio, has built its whole identity on that crossing, and its debut album, El viaje de Abendino, turns it into a story you can follow track by track.

Abendino is invented. He is a Jewish man from Granada who leaves his city under the Catholic Monarchs’ expulsion decree and works his way east across the sea to Constantinople, meeting along the way a patchwork of cultures, faiths and musical traditions, not all of them friendly. The band uses him as a thread rather than a lecture: in the announcement, the ensemble frames the record as a reflection on memory, exile and cultural dialogue rather than a historical reconstruction.

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The repertoire maps the route. Court songs from the Cancionero de Palacio, among them Rodrigo Martínez and two pieces by Juan del Encina, sit beside Italian Trecento music from the Codex Squarcialupi in Lorenzo da Firenze’s Non perch’i speri, donna, a dance by the Jewish dancing master Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, a vihuela fantasia by Luis Milán and the Andalusí song Ya Rasha al Fattan. Then the boat turns east: Sephardic songs such as Morena me llaman, Durme durme and Cuando el rey Nimrod, the Macedonian Jovano Jovanke, Bulgarian kopanitsa dances and, at journey’s end, Los caminos de Sirkedji. The booklet stitches the stations together with texts by Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi and the chronicler Elijah Capsali, and the credits include a narrator, Alberto Cavero.

It is a stage show first, which explains the narrative spine. The trio is Jon Wasserman on voice, vihuela, oud, archlute and tzouras; Olga Rodon Mas on medieval and Renaissance recorders; and Alberto Espinosa Díaz on a percussion arsenal that runs from the atabal and riq to bendirs, tombak and a square frame drum. Formed by performers and researchers trained in early music and ethnomusicology, the group has carried the Abendino programme to the Bloomington Early Music festival in the United States, to the early-music festivals of Granada, Morella and Alarcos and the Festival de Música Antiga dels Pirineus, and into spaces with obvious resonance: the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid, Girona’s Museum of Jewish History and the Sinagoga del Tránsito in Toledo.

The album was recorded in Madrid in February 2026 by Kaveh Sarvarian and mixed and mastered by Ernesto Santana at Estudio 343, with artwork and booklet designed by Inés Pina. It came out in mid-July 2026 as a physical CD and on Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music and the main streaming platforms.

Early-music debuts usually set out to prove a sound. This one maps a route instead, and it ends where the songs survived rather than where they began. The ensemble says it is already working on new programmes and formats; on this evidence, the itinerary is the method.

Tags: debut albums, Al Tayr Ensemble, Alberto Espinosa Díaz, early music, El viaje de Abendino, Jon Wasserman

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