Elana Sasson Quartet brings jazz-Kurdish fusion to Nicosia

The Elana Sasson Quartet plays Axiothea Mansion in Nicosia on 17 September at 8:30pm, presenting the concert programme "In Between" as part of the 29th Cultural Festival of the University of Cyprus. Tickets are €10.

The quartet formed while its members studied at Berklee College of Music in Valencia, the Spanish campus of the Boston conservatory that has become a meeting point for young musicians from different continents. Elana Sasson leads a lineup that brings together Santiago Bertel, Manos Stratis and Victor Goldschmidt, musicians from the United States, Colombia, Belgium and Cyprus respectively. That spread of nationalities is not incidental to the group's identity: it is written into the music itself.

Their sound sits somewhere between traditions rarely heard on the same stage. Persian poetry, Kurdish songs and Eastern Mediterranean musical forms run through the material, reworked with contemporary jazz improvisation. It is a combination that asks a Nicosia audience to hear these older, regional traditions filtered through the improvisational language most associated with American jazz, rather than presented as separate acts on a shared bill.

That approach has already found an audience beyond the conservatory. The quartet's debut album, also titled "In Between," climbed to No. 4 on the World Music Charts Europe, a ranking that tracks album airplay and sales across the continent's world music radio stations. Reaching the top five on a pan-European chart is a notable marker for a debut release, suggesting the record found programmers and listeners well outside the group's immediate circle. The quartet has also been nominated for the UPBEAT Best New Talent Award 2025, a recognition aimed specifically at newer acts rather than established names.

The Nicosia date places the quartet within a festival now in its 29th year, one of the University of Cyprus's longer-running cultural fixtures, and one that has room in its programme for acts still early in their career rather than only established names. For a group barely out of its Berklee years, a chart placement and an award nomination arriving in the same season mark unusually fast traction for what is still a young project, one built on members who scattered from four different countries and chose to keep playing together after graduation.