Bruckner through jazz music.
The Jazzrausch Bigband frees Bruckner’s intense harmonies in jazz.
The Jazzrausch Bigband will celebrate the bicentenary of Bruckner’s birth with a vision and lightweight version of his music and it will be interesting to see how this ‘explosive’ big band – our guest in Stresa for the second time – frees Bruckner’s intense harmonies in jazz.
Their programme Bruckner’s Breakdown – marking the bicentenary of the great Austrian composer’s birth – sends a cloudburst of orchestral sound and groove dubstep spreading through the concert hall and into the Festival boxes.
For the arrangements of Leonhard Kuhn in particular, and his new compositions, the group has expanded, adding a horn, percussion, bassoon, and three strings. The concert ecomes a melting pot of today’s music.
With an average of 80 concerts per year throughout Europe, America, Asia, and Africa, Jazzrausch Bigband is one of the busiest big bands in Europe. With “power, groove and enormous stage presence“ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), the band equally reaches audiences in both the jazz and electronic music scenes.
And everyone involved, the band just as much as the audience enjoy tearing down borders. In this context, the music of Jazzrausch Bigband seems to fulfill desires in multiple aspects: the appetite of club-lovers for more handmade and original music and the demand of jazz and classical afficionados for “oomph”, entertainment and a big sound.
This is why it is not exaggerated to call the band a phenomenon. One that shows in its very own way what is seething in the music genre that calls itself “jazz”. More than ever this has become the melting pot for everything that does not fit into any other category.
The driving forces behind Jazzrausch Bigband are Munich-based trombonist and music manager Roman Sladek and guitarist and composer Leonhard Kuhn. In 2015, just one year after its founding, Jazzrausch Bigband became artist in residence at one of the most renowned techno clubs in Europe, ‘Harry Klein.’ Having a resident big band in a techno club was unheard of before this band came along. Soon they began reaching larger audiences and the band was selling out rock venues like the Munich Muffathalle, as well as classical music halls like the Munich Philharmonic.
Tours have taken Jazzrausch Bigband to New York’s Lincoln Center, the JZ Festival in Shanghai, the Safaricom International Jazz Festival in Nairobi, the Ural Music Night in Yekaterinburg and the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, among many other places.
