Jazzrausch Bigband
Mahler's Breakdown

Music by Gustav Mahler, arranged by Leonhard Kuhn
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Umberto Echo
Recorded on March 19th 2023 at Dorian Gray Studios, Munich
Jazzrausch BIg Band, directed and produced by Roman Sladek

Photo by Sebastian Reiter
the art in music:cover art by sturmtiefdesign

With their invented explosive mix of big band jazz with techno rhythms and sounds, the Jazzrausch Bigband has become well-known. However, it is sometimes overlooked that bandleader Roman Sladek and chief composer Leonhard Kuhn also enjoy incorporating orchestral classical music into their concept. As early as 2016, they dealt with the music of the 19th-century Austrian romantic on "Bruckner's Breakdown". Brahms also appears in the JRBB program list. And at the height of their wave of success, "Beethoven's Breakdown" would likely have been another triumph in Beethoven's year 2020, had the pandemic not thwarted all performances.

Now, the high-pressure jazzers have once again dedicated themselves to a classic: Gustav Mahler. Unlike their previous classical adaptations, this time it's not a "best-of" of various compositions, but focused on a central work of Mahler's: his famous 5th Symphony in C-sharp minor, a masterpiece of the Viennese late romanticism at the threshold of modernity. Mahler himself struggled with it for a long time: "My fifth symphony is a cursed work. Nobody understands it," complained the composer, revising the instrumentation of his work several times after its premiere in 1904. He couldn't think of the most obvious solution: "The symphony was written for techno big bands, although they didn't exist at the time," says Jazzrausch Bigband founder and bandleader Roman Sladek with a wink.

Listening to the entry with the "funeral march" of the first movement, Sladek's joke gains a serious background: How a drum click and a guitar lick set the tempo, how the heavy brass introduces the theme, how the piano lays down a groove underneath, how all instruments together make the melody dance.
How then the saxophone takes over the theme and improvises further, how the whole culminates after a key change and ends again with click and guitar – this could not be written better for the Jazzrausch Bigband. The magnificent second movement or the dreamy fourth, sometimes leading into the classical big band sound, also seem tailor-made for this ensemble. As an encore, there is a movement from the 3rd Symphony – at Sladek's special request because of the outstanding trombone passages.

So "Mahler's Breakdown" is again an outstanding arrangement by the mastermind Leonhard Kuhn. "I had listened to all of his symphonies, but quickly decided on the fifth. Because it is well-known to the audience, and because it is powerful, but overall rather delicate. And perhaps also because I had heard it live in Dresden after one of our premieres and had a special connection to it."

The album turns the symphony on its head: 110 years later, Mahler's departure towards a new musical language is skillfully continued, as is his desire to cast parts with soloists. In the 50-minute techno version of the "Sinfonia Maledetta," as an Italian copyist called it, the Jazzrausch Bigband unfolds its instrumental versatility and sheer power. Not least through their energetic improvisations, the 15 musicians bring Mahler's (and Kuhn's) music into the here and now: A rave to listen to, a symphony to dance to.