The Simon Below Quartet's 2018 debut album, Wailing Wind's Story, already attracted a lot of attention, as did the concerts that followed. Thomas Mau praised in WDR3 "the enormous level of their interactions", Norbert Krampf emphasized in the FAZ the "rollercoaster-like dynamics and unexpected twists and turns" of a performance and summed it up: "Below's open, variable compositions leave room for individual design, which the band sometimes remarkably clarifies, sometimes fills with juvenile joy of playing". In August 2018 the Simon Below Quartet performed at the Avignon International Jazz Festival and won the Grand Prix du Jury: three days of recording at the famous La Buissonne Studio in Pernes les Fontaines in the south of France. Countless ECM productions have been recorded there (e.g. by Tigran Hamasyan, Florian Weber, Nik B?rtsch, Kristjan Randalu), as well as those by piano grandmasters such as Joachim K?hn, Brad Mehldau, Ahmad Jamal and Carla Bley. In addition to the studio days in the summer of 2019, the award included another festival performance on the main stage there, which was followed by enthusiastic articles in French jazz media. Elements Of Space now presents the recordings from La Buissonne. It is certainly not only because of the outstanding sound and the spirit of the studio that the nuanced music of the album sometimes reminds of productions from ECM. With a wink, Simon Below calls "chamber jazz with push" the style of his dynamic band, which moves confidently between nuanced, lyrical and gripping passages. Not infrequently even within a piece, as the lead story "Wasserschwimmer" impressively shows. Below's compositions are remarkably mature and multi-layered, no doubt thanks to his various sources of inspiration. They include jazz classics (Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane) and contemporary artists* (Sylvie Courvoisier, Tyshawn Sorey), as well as Bela Bart?k (partly because of his innovative overlapping of two different harmonies for that time) and Fr?d?ric Mompou.
