Dekel Epstein earned a first degree in jazz performance from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, spending two of those years in Tel Aviv at the Shtriker Jazz Program, run in partnership with the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York. Somewhere around that time he also traveled extensively through South America, and the trip left a mark on how he thinks about composing: music built to carry more than one place in it at once.

That idea became Sandia, the Tel Aviv band Epstein formed in 2018 with pianist Shauli Shoub and drummer Shany Dar after the three met at a local jam session. It started as a trio and has since worked with more than one bassist -- Avri Borochov and Lior Nachmias both appear on the band's eventual debut album, and a bassist billed as Jonathan Heruti (also credited elsewhere as Yonatan Harut) has filled the chair live. Shoub doubles as a member of the hip-hop duo paper.planez outside of Sandia, but inside the band, the writing runs mostly through Epstein: he is credited as composer on seven of the ten tracks on Sandia's debut album.

The band's first single, "Navad" ("Wandering"), came out in May 2021 and found an early audience outside Israel when a French magazine placed it in a new-artists playlist. The clearer signal came in 2023, when "Sabres," originally released as a 2022 single, won first prize in the Pros & Amateurs category at the 8th edition of the 7 Virtual Jazz Club, an international competition. The version that won was recorded in an expanded seven-piece configuration -- the core quartet plus oud, vocals, percussion, and a didgeridoo -- and the contest jury's own write-up called the didgeridoo drone specifically "inspired." All About Jazz picked "Sabres" as a Song of the Day that September.

The debut album, Sipur Layla ("Story of a Night"), followed in 2024 on Emmaya Records: ten tracks, recorded mostly at Kicha Studios in Tel Aviv and mixed at Sweden's Nilento Studio, running just over an hour. Nine of the ten tracks are original Epstein compositions (one, "Broken," is credited to bassist Lior Nachmias); the exception is "Etz Harimon" ("Pomegranate Tree"), a jazz arrangement of a melody by Yedidya Admon, one of the composers associated with early 20th-century Hebrew folk song. Reaching that far back for material, then running it through a modern jazz quartet, is the same instinct that shaped "Navad" and "Sabres" -- treating jazz as a frame flexible enough to hold Middle Eastern modes, a decades-old Hebrew tune, and a didgeridoo without any of it feeling like a novelty.

By the time the album landed, Sandia had already built a European following through touring rather than recordings: a February 2024 date at Jazz Club Ferrara in Italy, a Berlin performance billed as "Atempo & Sandia -- Jazz aus Israel," a May 2025 stop at M8 Liveclub in Mainz, Germany, and a return to Israel to play the BYU Jerusalem Center in November 2025 -- a date where drummer Noam David sat in for Shany Dar.

Epstein's writing sits at the intersection of jazz harmony and material drawn from outside the jazz tradition altogether -- Hebrew folk song on "Etz Harimon," Middle Eastern and world-music instrumentation (oud, didgeridoo) layered into "Sabres," and a compositional restlessness he traces back to time spent traveling through South America before Sandia existed. All About Jazz's own tagging of the band -- Ethnic Jazz, Fusion, Polyphony, Polyrhythmics, World Music -- reflects that same instinct: complex, layered writing that still resolves into catchy, groove-driven melody rather than staying abstract. A contest jury reviewing "Sabres" called the band "an excellent band, ably referencing the idioms and rhythms of their region," with instrumentation that "works perfectly."