Jazzrausch Bigband
Alle Jahre wieder!

Jazzrausch Bigband has more or less invented a new art form, techno jazz, and has become well-known for performances of it. But the band also has another, different story to tell. It has invented its own tradition of hitting the road and touring at the end of each year with a programme consisting of Christmas music, and has been doing this ever since the band first emerged eight years ago. Bandleader and founder Roman Sladek explains: “Whereas our regular projects – the most recent album, ‘Emergenz’, is a good example – are all about working through a specific theme and finding new ways to reinvent ourselves, our Christmas thing is something we do for one reason alone: to have fun. It was our very first programme, we still love it, and we’re still nurturing, developing and growing it. Being able to devote one month a year entirely to the big band tradition is something we’re all really passionate about.”

The band has already released four albums since its 2019 ACT debut, “Dancing Wittgenstein”, including a first Christmas programme, “Still! Still! Still!” (also in 2019). Jazzrausch Bigband has gone on expanding and renewing its holiday season repertoire. So, naturally, when a major Germany-wide Christmas tour around the major concert halls in the big cities started to beckon after the Corona break, Sladek figured: “this theme being so close to all of our hearts, it was time to record a new album. So here we are with ‘Alle Jahre Wieder’”.

Some bands might have been tempted just to throw together an album of Christmas chestnuts any old how, but the Jazzrausch way of doing things is not like that at all. Indeed, the band would hardly have become the force of success and innovation which we know today if it had chosen easy options. Jazzrausch Bigband is more comfortable with the concept of pushing itself to do better than with being content with what it has done. For this band, things always have to be different, contain surprises, and have genuine “oomph”. Those strong imperatives have been there right from the start of the preparations for this album: as early as this spring, Sladek commissioned the band’s chief composer and arranger Leonhard Kuhn to put together a 50-minute programme of completely new pieces. Rehearsals and recording were wedged in between the very few gaps remaining in the band’s hyper-busy summer touring schedule.

The earlier Christmas album “Still! Still! Still!” was already a kaleidoscope of big band styles, and yet Jazzrausch Bigband has managed to broaden the spectrum for “Alle Jahre wieder!” even further. In terms of form it is even more concentrated.

Unlike any other album by the band, for the first time we hear purely instrumental music. Furthermore, Kuhn has taken ten classic Christmas songs – each one of them rarely heard in jazz, and tunes which can often come across as a bit staid in their original settings – from “Tochter Zion, freue dich” to “Adeste fideles” or “Ihr Kinderlein, kommet”. The title track, “Alle Jahre wieder!” (based on the 1830s carol to music by Silcher which is very familiar to children and adults in the German-speaking world) appears here in completely new orchestral garb. Sometimes the listener will recognise the kind of swing typical of Glenn Miller. At other moments it is the incomparable big band elegance of, say, Artie Shaw. “Es wird scho glei dumpa” (an Austrian carol) is given the full extra-high-pressure Tijuana brass treatment. “Maria durch ein’ Dornwald ging” gets the touch of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra after a Henry Mancini-like intro, and “Ich steh’ an deiner Krippe hier” recalls more of the great swing heritage.

“We had such a great time, a Fetz’ngaudi”, Sladek smiles.

The sense of enjoyment is absolutely everywhere on the album, where masterful playing and a mischievous glint in the eye go well together. Any tendency towards being introspective and over-thoughtful is simply blown away as listeners are swept up in the frenzy of Christmas joy and Christmas jazz. At the same time, “Alle Jahre wieder!” is a Christmas homage to the greats of big band history. “It’s almost over-sentimental when one realises, thinking how this recording was sandwiched between all kinds of live performances, that you’re part of something that might one day become an anecdote in jazz history. Yes, we are that very rare thing nowadays: a big band that really plays a lot. It’s a phenomenon that you only normally encounter when you dig into the past.”

And it’s about even more: “This music simply has an incredible power and joie de vivre… but that doesn’t mean you have to play it wearing a suit. We want to present it in a more authentic, modern, humorous and attractive way. In such a way that everyone can relate to it in the reality of their own everyday life. In a Christmas programme, everyone can meet on common ground. And from there it’s a journey we take together.” So, once again Jazzrausch Bigband has succeeded in a way that only very few in the jazz field can, notwithstanding the openness of the genre: they have brought young and old together, tradition and revolution, the familiar and the new. Which is why it feels so completely natural and right that they should continue to do this ‘again every year’, as the album title tells them: “Alle Jahre wieder”.