Elana Sasson: In Between

Elana Sasson's work is singularly intercultural and cosmopolitan, by heritage, training and aesthetic preference. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she was naturally steeped in American music of various sorts and learned fundamentals of Western classical music in school. At home, though, especially with her grandfather and through years of private lessons with the contemporary vocal duo Mahsa and Marjan Vahdat, she listened to and studied the Kurdish and Persian classical music of her ancestry.

In Between embraces, as she says in the liner notes, her cultural "in-betweenness—not as a place of confusion, but as a rich, expressive space where contrasts meet, and new meanings emerge." She presents original settings of works by Persian and Kurdish poets ("Bahari Digar," "Nerges," "Hêvî"), jazz arrangements of existing Kurdish pieces ("Akh Leil" and "Laye Laye"), a Sephardic song in Ladino ("Ay Ke Buena") and new compositions in which voice functions instrumentally, without lyrics ("In Between" and "Elaneven").

She took her undergraduate degree not in music, but in design media arts at UCLA, then moved to Spain for a master's in contemporary performance and production at Berklee. In Valencia, she met Colombian pianist and composer Santiago Bertel and the other members of her core ensemble, Cypriot bassist-composer Manos Stratis and Belgian drummer Victor Goldschmidt.

Bertel co-produced and co-arranged In Between, which includes guest spots from Iranian flutist-composer Kaveh Sarvarian, French cellist-composer Matthieu Saglio and Bosnian trumpeter Miron Rafajlovic. "Guest instruments," Sasson told AAJ in an email exchange, "often appear in contexts outside their native traditions yet find their natural place within the arrangements."

"The vocalises," on the other hand, "are purposefully without language, allowing the melodies to be pure and without borders, like a memory of home floating over more intricate rhythmic language." You might imagine an aural parallel to Marc Chagall's "Au-dessus de la ville" paintings, in which people—lovers, musicians—appear suspended in flight above the rooftops. "In Between" and "Elaneven," the two wordless pieces, convey seemingly effortlessly what she identifies as a central ethos of the project: an ineffable longing.

Although she sees herself as an upbeat person, Sasson is drawn musically to the kind of introspective/retrospective passion that she and her ensemble express in her composition "Nerges" (Narcissus Flower) and its prelude. The piece sets an anonymous Kurdish poem:

Sun of the narcissus, light of my soul, the fragrance of roses surrounds me. My heart is full of longing and sorrow, my soul is tied to the beauty of the flowers.

"Prelude to Nerges" emerged spontaneously in the studio, an avaz-type improvisation between Sasson's voice and Sarvarian's ney, a rim-blown reed flute with a thick, velvety timbre and quasi-vocal tone. Sasson's singing is at once unaffected and highly refined, the sound at times vulnerably straightforward, unadorned until it erupts into the rapid oscillations of tahrir or settles surely on a melodic neutral second, a pitch between the cracks of the piano keyboard.

Sasson and her cohort intentionally reserved key compositional elements to be determined in the moment. "Prelude to Nerges," in its entirety, and the final arrangement of "In Between" were left to be created on the spot, "saved for the recording process," as she put it. This adds a sort of shimmer, a frisson of the act of creation. The music is both old and new, resonating with that of Greek early-music and free-jazz singer Savina Yannatou and her group Primavera en Salonico, who meticulously study ancient music and perform it in ways that honor its origins while liberating it through free improvisation.

Music remains ephemeral despite our attempts to preserve it. "Every note is a lifetime for itself," as Daniel Barenboim has said, which gives it a "really tragic element...the fact that it can die" ("On the Duration of Notes," PBS, 2009). Musical sound "does not exist in our world," as he put it. With In Between, Sasson offers an eloquent and affecting music that lives between worlds in a liminal state of bittersweet yearning.