Jazzrausch Bigband are the latest group to join the ACT family of artists and they stand out as being unique in several respects, in the first place for size and versatility, with more than 40 musicians as regular members. Jazzrausch play an average of 120 concerts a year, which would clearly be impossible to achieve without this benchstrength.

Within one year the ensemble performed at Lincoln Center in New York, the JZ Festival in Shanghai, the Safaricom International Jazz Festival in Nairobi, the Ural Music Night in Yekaterinburg and the SXSW in Austin TX. The band’s rapid rise in just five years of existence naturally has everything to do with instigator and leader, trombonist Roman Sladek.

The band now have two ACT albums as a visiting card: the re-release of ‘Dancing Wittgenstein’, the successful techno-jazz program and ‘Still! Still! Still!’, a Christmas album in classic big band style.

“The Christmas programme was actually the first one we ever played,” explains Sladek. “And we’ve enjoyed developing it further every year since. In the run-up to Christmas, it provides the perfect counterweight to the thrills of the techno shows that we do for the rest of the year.”

‘Still!, Still!, Still!’ consists of Leonhard Kuhn’s multi-layered orchestrations for the band’s 18 musicians of twelve popular German Christmas songs, traversing the entire history of big band repertoire – and justifying those three exclamation marks in the album title. The opener is a Basie-style swinger ‘Leise rieselt der Schnee’ with extremes of soft and loud; ‘Engel auf den Feldern singen’ (Shepherds in the Field Abiding) receives a brisk Herb Alpert treatment; ‘Fröhliche Weihnacht überall’ has the characteristic Stan Kenton sound.