The Elana Sasson Quartet, based in Valencia, brings to this single a deceptively spare architecture: piano and Rhodes courtesy of Santiago Bertel, the resonant, unhurried walk of Manos Stratis on double bass, and the barely-there percussion of Victor Goldschmidt, whose drumming has the quality of breath withheld. Over this, Sasson herself does not sing words — she employs vocalise, the wordless human voice as pure melodic instrument, gliding through pitch and timbre with a freedom that lyrics would only have encumbered. It was, as *Songlines* observed of the original album version, filled with both longing and joy simultaneously, and this new incarnation deepens that paradox rather than resolving it.

The genius of the arrangement lies in what Ara Dinkjian brings to it. The Armenian-American oud master — whose compositional reach spans thirteen languages and whose melody *Dinata* rang out at the closing ceremony of the Athens Olympics in 2004 — is not deployed here as ornamentation or as a guest star lending exotic colour to someone else's canvas. He is woven into the very fabric of the piece. The oud and Sasson's voice pursue each other in a dialogue that feels ancient and urgent in equal measure; at moments they shadow each other so closely that the boundary between the plucked string and the human throat seems to dissolve. This is the kind of musical conversation that cannot be arranged from the outside — it requires a shared inheritance, a common emotional language spoken long before the recording light came on.

That inheritance matters enormously to understanding what this single is doing. Sasson, Persian and Kurdish-American by background, grew up absorbing Dinkjian's melodies as something close to home rather than as foreign repertoire, and the single quietly insists on the significance of that. The track's title, *"in between"*, speaks to the experience of occupying multiple cultural identities at once — of belonging fully to more than one world, and therefore never entirely at ease in any single one. Dinkjian himself, raised in the United States within a family of Armenian heritage, understands this condition from the inside. The collaboration, then, is not cross-cultural so much as it is a meeting of people who know the same kind of longing from different angles, and that gives the music a psychological texture that purely technical accomplishment could never manufacture.

At four minutes and fifty-one seconds, the track exercises a rare self-discipline. The temptation to let the oud take flight into extended solo terrain must have been considerable, and yet the single maintains its chamber intimacy throughout, trusting silence and space as much as sound. Goldschmidt's drums surface and recede like something glimpsed at the edge of vision; Bertel's piano has the quality of memory — present but not insistent. Stratis on double bass provides the quiet gravitational centre around which everything else orbits. The recording, captured by Sebastian Laverde at Jazz Tone Studios in Valencia and subsequently mixed and mastered by George Karyiotis in Athens, carries an acoustic warmth that suits the material perfectly: nothing here is processed into abstraction; the room is audible, the musicians palpably present.

For Sasson personally, having Dinkjian on this recording carries the weight of a long-held aspiration realised. Her description of listening to his melodies in childhood as something "deeply familiar and close to home" illuminates why the collaboration works as well as it does: the emotion between them is not manufactured for the occasion but pre-existing, drawn up from a shared well of musical culture spanning the Mediterranean and West Asia. Dinkjian, for his part, plays with the particular ease of a musician who has nothing left to prove — phrases arc and settle with effortless authority, never imposing, always listening.

The Elana Sasson Quartet has been nominated for the 2026 Upbeat Platform Best New Talent Award for Spain, and listening to "in between", it becomes clear why their profile is rising. This is music that repays close attention, that grows richer rather than thinner on repeated listening, and that accomplishes something genuinely difficult: the fusion of jazz, Mediterranean folk tradition, and contemporary minimalism into something that sounds not like a fusion at all, but like a natural and inevitable language of its own.

A single of extraordinary poise and depth. Do not miss it.

Elana Sasson Quartet: "in between" (feat. Ara Dinkjian) is out now via PK Musik.