Jon Elbaz Quartet

What happens when a quartet stops treating rhythm, synchronisation and musical “togetherness” as fixed coordinates? For New York composer and pianist **Jon Elbaz**, the answer lies somewhere between late- Romantic composition, Black American music, modernism, rock, pop and the unruly possibilities of improvisation. His music moves through dense structures and sudden gaps, intricate rhythmic designs and clouds of texture — less interested in pristine resolution than in the strange, unstable spaces that emerge when different musical languages begin to overlap. At the centre is a quartet of musicians who know how to navigate that terrain: saxophonist Matt Knoegel, bassist Thorbjørn Stefansson´ and percussionist James Paul Nadien. Elbaz calls them his “certified plumbers”: the right people for the job, requiring little explanation of how, what or why. Their first European concert comes to Three Skies in Cologne - a meeting point for composed detail, collective intuition and music that refuses to stay in its designated place. Come closer. Listen for what happens in between.