Following her debut productions El Camino (JHM 221) and Short Stories (JHM 253), Susanne Paul and her Berlin ensemble MOVE String Quartet present bloom, their third album on JHM. The string quartet genre was initially shaped by 250 years of classical tradition. Later, in the field of jazz swing and bebop, strings tended to be assigned the task of laying a decorative carpet of sound under solo wind instruments. High time to change that. In the MOVE String Quartet, four independent jazz soloists play together and formulate clear cross-genre musical points of view through their hybrid compositions. All four band members of the MOVE String Quartet are active in the lively Berlin jazz scene. Each of them brings additional musical inspirations to the quartet with which they surprise and animate each other, making the band's concerts interactive and extremely lively. The unconventional line-up with double bass instead of second violin also ensures a particularly warm, rich sound.

Bandleader Susanne Paul says: "The line-up of my quartet is an absolute stroke of luck for me - my 'supergroup' of jazz string players. I searched for a long time to find people who have a classical sound culture but can also really rock. What was most important to me was that they approached making music with a jazz approach, that each has developed their own sound on their instrument, and plays with a lot of personality."

The MOVE String Quartet actually manages to combine the sound parameters of European classical music with the improvisational structures of jazz with such naturalness that one wonders why productions of this kind are so rare. Robust, fragile, playful and laconic, full of character, touching, with ever new impulses and surprises: the players keep each other on their toes, the band organism in motion and thus ensure that their interplay always remains lively and wide awake. Precise and animated, these short stories live through their sound.