Bassam Saba was born October 26, 1958, in Tripoli, Lebanon, to Antoine Saba, who worked for an oil company, and Delena Saba, a homemaker. Music ran through the household from the start — his older siblings taught him nay (the Arabic end-blown reed flute) as a boy, and he picked up violin and oud alongside it, formalizing that training as a teenager at the Lebanon National Conservatory. He was still a teenager in 1976 when the Lebanese Civil War forced his family out of the country; he landed in Paris, where he earned a Bachelor's degree in Western classical music and flute performance from the Conservatoire Municipal des Gobelins. His earliest confirmed recording credit dates from just before that move — arranging two tracks, at around nineteen or twenty, on the 1978 Beirut cassette release by the pioneering Lebanese folk-rock band Ferkat Al Ard (فرقة الأرض).

From Paris, Saba went on to advanced graduate study in Moscow at the Gnessin Musical Pedagogical Institute, earning a Master's degree in flute performance and music education in 1985 — a second, fully Western classical credential layered on top of his Arabic training. Discogs credits from the years around this period place him as a session flutist on Lebanese releases including Force's 1991 cassette Reinforced and Oussama Rahbany's 1997 New Order (النظام الجديد), featuring Carole Samaha and Lorette Helou. He also served a stint as musical director of the Beirut Symphonic Band before relocating to New York, where he gained real prominence performing in Simon Shaheen's ensembles — the Near Eastern Music Ensemble and the group Qantara, credited on Qantara's 2001 album Blue Flame playing flute and ney across most of the record.

Saba's central artistic relationship, though, was with Marcel Khalife: for decades he was the principal nay, flute, and violin player in Khalife's ensemble Al-Mayadeen, one of the defining voices of politically engaged Arabic song since the 1970s. He toured and recorded across the Arab world and internationally with Fairouz — Lebanon's most iconic vocalist, and a rare direct credit, playing oud and flute on her 1999 release Mish Kayen Hayk T'Koun — and was a member of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, later serving on the faculty of Silkroad's Global Musician Workshop. His crossover work reached well beyond Arabic and classical circles: he's the confirmed ney and oud player on track A3 of Sting's 2009 holiday album If On A Winter's Night… (Deutsche Grammophon/Cherrytree), and biographical sources consistently credit him with recording or performing alongside Alicia Keys, Santana, Herbie Hancock, and Quincy Jones, in addition to appearances with cellist Maya Beiser (oud on 2010's Provenance, including the tracks "I Was There" and "Mar de Leche"), pianist Matt Herskowitz (2010's Jerusalem Trilogy), violist/composer Eyvind Kang (2012's The Narrow Garden), conductor Kristjan Järvi's Absolute Ensemble (2011's Arabian Nights, live at Town Hall NYC), and pipa player Gao Hong (2015's Pipa Potluck). He was also an honored soloist with the Hanover Philharmonic, Qatar Philharmonic, Beirut Philharmonic, Zurich Orchestra, and the East Oakland Bay Symphony.

In 2007, the same year the National Arab American Museum named him one of its ten most outstanding artists of the preceding decade, Saba co-founded the New York Arabic Orchestra, which he went on to direct. Working with a core group drawn from that orchestra, billed as the Bassam Saba Ensemble, he released Wonderful Land in January 2010 — a self-released, Bandcamp-only album of traditional Arabic repertoire and his own compositions, and the closest thing to a leader album in his catalog. Its four tracks ("Nirvana," "Wonderful Land," "Orange Dusk (Nay Improvisation)," and "Waltz to My Father") find him playing oud, nay, flute, violin, buzuq, and saz. He also composed for and performed with his own ensemble, Myriad, and directed the Middle Eastern Ensemble at Harvard University, teaching thousands of students over his career through private instruction, university residencies, and workshops.

In 2018, Saba returned to Lebanon to become President of the Lebanese National Higher Conservatory of Music — a position he reportedly held without pay for a time because of a bureaucratic error, without it deterring him from the work. His final public performance came on October 17, 2020, playing flute in a Telemann chamber piece at a fundraising concert in Bsharri for a conservatory building damaged in Beirut's August 2020 port explosion. Three days later, at a conservatory board meeting, he contracted COVID-19; he developed septic shock from a hospital-acquired infection and died in Beirut on December 4, 2020, at age 62. He was survived by his wife, Dr. Diala Jaber, and daughter, Mariana.

What set Saba apart was the rare, genuine fluency he carried in two full musical systems rather than one dressed up as the other: a formal Western classical education in flute, carried through a Paris conservatory degree and a Moscow master's, sitting alongside a childhood-deep command of nay, oud, and violin within Arabic classical and folk tradition. That dual grounding is what let him move convincingly between Marcel Khalife's politically charged Arabic song, Fairouz's classical Lebanese repertoire, Yo-Yo Ma's cross-cultural Silk Road Ensemble, orchestral soloist dates with European and Middle Eastern philharmonics, and one-off studio appearances for pop and jazz artists like Sting — without any of those contexts sounding like a guest spot. He treated that fluency as something to be taught as much as performed: co-founding and directing the New York Arabic Orchestra, leading Harvard's Middle Eastern Ensemble, and teaching at Silkroad's Global Musician Workshop, he spent as much of his career building institutions and students as he did building his own recorded catalog — which is why his discography reads overwhelmingly as a sideman and collaborator's catalog, with his own compositions surfacing mainly on 2010's Wonderful Land and on the New York Arabic Orchestra's ongoing work.