“The spoken poem only works when read aloud,” Ernst Jandl (1925–2000) once said, and he was without a doubt the finest performer of his own works. Be it sound poems, or poems in “run-down language”, or the four-line “stanzas” – it took Jandl’s interpretational skill to make them come truly alive. And lest this striking, instantly recognisable voice and Jandl’s poetry sink into oblivion, Christian Muthspiel went ahead and wrote vom Jandln zum Ernst, a piece tailor-made for the unorthodox instrumentation of his jazz orchestra ORJAZZTRA VIENNA, creating the illusion of a joint live performance with Jandl himself by introducing the poet’s voice, extracted from various recordings, as the main soloist. Muthspiel had played live on stage with Ernst Jandl back in the 1980s, and after the poet’s death performed the solo piece “für und mit ernst”, in which he duetted with Jandl’s voice, more than one hundred times. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Jandl’s birth, Muthspiel has distilled decades of enthusiasm for Jandl’s oeuvre (who was himself a keen lover of jazz) into a ninety-minute oratorio for a poet’s voice and seventeen jazz soloists.

Large contemporary jazz ensembles have become few and far between. One of the consequences of the past decade’s wage squeeze has been the loss of a culture that has shaped the history of one of the 20th century’s greatest musical inventions: From Duke Ellington to Carla Bley, from the Sun Ra Arkestra to the Vienna Art Orchestra, large formations have always been part of the canon of improvised music.

With a view of counteracting this regrettable trend, Christian Muthspiel founded his 17-piece jazz orchestra in 2019, gathering around him musicians from Austria’s astonishingly populous young creative scene. With a double rhythm section (two basses, two drums), a piano, a six-piece woodwind section plus three trumpets and three trombones, this ensemble’s intention is to create a sound that is based on complex scores and is informed by the virtues of classical orchestral playing.

The emergence of each musician from the collective as an individual with an improvised solo is a consistent, central principle of all of Christian Muthspiel’s compositional work for his Orjazztra Vienna.