Kaye Ree

Isfahan, then the Frankfurt commuter belt

Kaye-Ree was born Kathrin Eftekhari on 3 January 1979 in Isfahan, Iran, to an Iranian father and a German mother. The family later moved to the area around Frankfurt am Main, which has been her base ever since. She has described the position she writes from as being caught between two cultures, and the split runs through the material rather than sitting decoratively on top of it: Persian classical music and Motown were both in the house.

The names she cites as formative are Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, India.Arie and Stevie Wonder. The Wonder connection stopped being abstract at some point — she has sung in a background choir for him, which remains the single line in her biography that tends to get read out first.

She began performing in 2003. In 2004 she met the classical guitarist Felix Justen, and that partnership became the spine of the early work, widening into a quartet with the percussionists Kiomars Nawab on tabla and her brother Amir Eftekhari on drums. In 2007 she opened for Kurtis Blow and Busta Rhymes; laut.de treats those support slots as the point at which making a full album stopped being hypothetical. She has also opened for Speech Debelle.

Three albums, one label, no outside money

Endless Melody arrived in May 2009, produced and released independently. The record pulled jazz, contemporary R&B, alternative hip hop and 1970s soul into the same set of songs, and it was covered by the German jazz press, including Jazzthetik and Jazz thing.

New Air followed in 2013 and moved the other way — more acoustic, more jazz-weighted, and built with instruments from outside the soul palette: sitar, mbira, tabla. Felix Justen composed on it and Marco Lehmann produced. Two passages are spoken in Farsi. The deluxe edition came packaged with a naturally formulated perfume called Air, which is the sort of decision only an artist financing her own release gets to make. The album was re-released internationally through her own Reelement Records in 2018.

Critics have filed her under neo-soul and reached for India.Arie and Erykah Badu as reference points. Her own term for it is Global Soul — a phrase meant to sidestep boundaries of style, country and belief. The lyrics take on dependence on technology, ignorance, egoism, nationalism and chauvinism, which she frames without much fuss: in an interview published on 8 October 2024 she said her music is not political but socially critical, the point being to move listeners towards doing something.

The quiet years, television, and Growth

Asked about the long gap after New Air, her answer has been blunt — life got in the way. Alongside the music she works as a Lufthansa flight attendant at Frankfurt's First Class Terminal, a detail she has never hidden and which explains both the gap and the survival of the catalogue.

In 2018 she competed in series eight of The Voice of Germany, turning all four chairs and joining Team Fanta. She later appeared on Zeig uns Deine Stimme!, disguised as a firefighter. For a chunk of her current audience, particularly at the smaller German venues, the television run is still the first point of recognition.

Growth, her third album, came out in November 2021, with a deluxe edition carrying bonus material in 2022. Thirteen songs, written by Felix Justen, Martin Loos, Amir Eftekhari and Kaye-Ree, produced by Loos — now her working guitarist — and Kaye-Ree, on Reelement Records. The direction is deliberately funkier and more danceable than New Air, and the writing turns inward onto motherhood, relationships and a stubborn optimism. Venue copy for the touring cycle described it as a groove-led record that keeps its depth.

The brother records

The most active thread in her recent work is the duo with Amir Eftekhari. He drums in the band, but also plays classical guitar, and the two have been writing together and billing the pairing under variations on brother-and-sister — Brudi-Schwesti, Bruder und Schwester Acoustic Soul.

In the October 2024 interview she said she was in the studio with Amir and the producer Marco Lehmann, aiming to release new material by the end of that year, and that she intended to record in German for the first time after a catalogue sung entirely in English.

The songs have been road-tested in public rather than held back. New sibling material was played at the Pudelclub in Hünfelden on 5 April 2025, at Oaks Bar in Frankfurt on 7 June 2025, at Cascadas in Hamburg with the trio on 6 September 2025, and at the Intercultural Week open-air stage in Diez on 21 September 2025. A duo show at Café Love Story in Hamburg on 4 September 2026 was built entirely around old and new love songs with Amir on guitar.

Ree-Flection

The current show has a name and a thesis. Ree-Flection premiered at the Stadthalle Idstein on 26 October 2025, a three-hour evening from 19:00 with the Independent Artists Unite collective opening. Kaye-Ree describes it as a musical mirror rather than a conventional concert, and puts the argument plainly: what is not faced cannot be changed, and what is not reflected on cannot heal.

The set draws across all three albums — Reality, Natural High, I See You, Up To Me and Bigger Picture are the named anchors — and the staging adds projections, spoken word and atmospheric soundscapes to a live band. It is the first time she has wrapped the catalogue in a single concept, and she has since carried the format into rooms far smaller than Idstein, including a version at Oaks Bar in Frankfurt on 7 March 2026 followed by a DJ set from Dennis Smith.

Where she stands in September 2026

The 2026 diary has been dense and almost entirely German, run at three scales: full band, the Kaye-Ree Trio or Quartett, and the duo with Amir. It opened at the Kurhaus in Bad Camberg on 21 February, took in the Ree-Flection show at Oaks Bar on 7 March, a quartet night at Thing e.V. in Limburg an der Lahn on 28 March that sold out, the brother-and-sister set at AJDA in Frankfurt on 18 April, a living-room-style show at Weinländer in Wiesbaden on 30 April, Hahnstätten on 16 May, the Querbeet Kulturfestival in Gelsenkirchen on 3 July, Café Love Story in Hamburg on 4 September, the International Women's Theatre Festival in Frankfurt with Amir on 18 September, and a benefit for the hospice group Hospizgemeinschaft Arche Noah at the Kino CasaBlanca in Bad Soden on 19 September at €19.90.

A second career has grown alongside the concerts. She runs voice and breath work — a Find Your Voice workshop at the Akademie des Ehrenamts in Bad Camberg on 17 May 2025, a Breathwalk and singing retreat at the ZEN Retreat House near Friedland from 19 to 21 June 2025 at €850, and a BreathWalk & Sing weekend at Schloss Vietgest in Mecklenburg over the Whitsun break from 22 to 25 May 2026. It is the same material as the concerts approached from the other side.

As of late September 2026 there is one date on sale: 17 October 2026 at Oaks Bar in Frankfurt. Beyond that the pattern of the last two years suggests the German-language sibling recordings, first flagged in October 2024 and still unreleased as an album, are the thing to watch.