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.”

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. 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.

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’.