Vienna stands at a considerable remove from New York’s Lincoln Center within the jazz community. Consequently, Mathias Rüegg’s Vienna Art Orchestra shares little with Wynton Marsalis’ Lincoln Center big band beyond basic components, much as a Sacher torte and a Hostess Cup Cake diverge despite overlapping ingredients; the Austrian creation delivers deeper satisfaction. At the century’s turn the Lincoln Center model cast the jazz big band as a completed historical artifact, anchored in earlier eras and functioning chiefly as a repertory group. The VAO, by contrast, honors core jazz principles yet remains oriented toward current and future possibilities. Drawing on jazz idioms that range from mainstream to avant-garde, classical sources such as Erik Satie—a composer Rüegg particularly admires—and vernacular traditions, the ensemble proceeds with discernment and frequent wit.
Rüegg entered the world in Zurich, Switzerland. He first encountered jazz while attending secondary school, then relocated to Austria and enrolled at the Musikhochschule in Graz during the early 1970s. After settling in Vienna he performed as a solo pianist in a nightclub. The addition of saxophonist Wolfgang Puschnig converted the solo act into a duo; further expansion produced an ensemble of up to sixteen musicians, at which point the Vienna Art Orchestra came into being.
The group never observed standard big-band instrumentation. Rüegg routinely introduces such instruments as marimba, bass clarinet, piccolo, tuba, and alphorn into his scores. Performance contexts likewise depart from convention; the orchestra has collaborated with choirs and brass bands and has contributed to television and film projects.
By 1980 the ensemble had earned sufficient notice to receive festival engagements in Cologne and Zurich, and it secured its initial recording agreement with the Swiss hatART label. In 1984 the band toured the United States and placed first in Down Beat’s critics’ poll for Talent Deserving Wider Recognition. By the late 1980s it ranked among the foremost large jazz ensembles worldwide, a standing it retained into the following century.
For the orchestra’s first fifteen years Rüegg served as its sole composer and arranger. Beginning in 1992 he commissioned works from additional writers, yet the group continued to reflect his distinctive imprint.
