The title track from Elana Sasson‘s 2025 album In Between was originally a voice-and-piano duet. The quartet had been playing it live for a year, fell in love with what the bigger arrangement did to the song, and took it back into the studio with one addition: Ara Dinkjian on oud.

Sasson is a Persian/Kurdish-American vocalist and composer based in Valencia, drawing on Kurdish mountain songs, Persian poetry, and jazz harmony shaped through years of training with master musicians in Iran and Kurdistan. She grew up listening to Dinkjian, an Armenian-American oudist who founded Night Ark in 1985, one of the first groups to place Armenian and Anatolian folk music inside a jazz framework, and has written melodies recorded in thirteen languages across the Mediterranean and West Asia. Both are Americans from diasporic Middle Eastern musical families, and the oud carries that shared ground directly into a song about living between worlds.

Santiago Bertel, the Colombian pianist and composer who co-produced the album, plays piano and Rhodes, with Cypriot double bassist Manos Stratis and drummer Victor Goldschmidt. Five instruments where the original had two, recorded at Jazz Tone Studios in Valencia and mixed by George Karyiotis in Athens, out now on PKMusik.

Stream “In Between” HERE and get your copy of In Between following THIS LINK