Bryan Ferry is celebrating 40 years of releasing records by putting out something of a career retrospective. Rather than just giving the Roxy Music hits a remastering once-over, he’s assembled a crack team of jazzers to form The Bryan Ferry Orchestra, who have recorded The Jazz Age, reinterpreting 13 tracks from Ferry’s catalogue as instrumental homages to the 1920s. The album is out on November 26, via BMG Rights Management, and we’ve got an exclusive preview – have a look at the video for ‘The Only Face’ below:
The material accompanying the album cites Louis Armstrong’s Hot Seven, Bix Beiderbecke’s Wolverines and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band as musical touchpoints, with nary a whiff of Eno electronics to be heard.
What with all the Gatsby glitz and dapper flappers, it’s perhaps not such a surprise that the era appeals to Ferry, who says: “I started my musical journey listening to a fair bit of jazz, mainly instrumental, and from diverse and contrasting periods. I loved the way the great soloists would pick up a tune and shake it up – go somewhere completely different – and then return gracefully back to the melody, as if nothing had happened. This seemed to me to reach a sublime peak with the music of Charlie Parker, and later Ornette Coleman. More recently, I have been drawn back to the roots, to the weird and wonderful music of the 1920s – the decade that became known as The Jazz Age.
"After forty years of making records, both in and out of Roxy Music, I thought now might be an interesting moment to revisit some of these songs, and approach them as instrumentals in the style of that magical period – bringing a new and different life to these songs – a life without words”.
We’ll be posting an interview with Ferry over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on the site. In the meantime, have a look at the album’s tracklisting below:
- ‘Do The Strand’
- ‘Love Is The Drug’
- ‘Don’t Stop The Dance’
- ‘Just Like You’
- ‘Avalon’
- ‘The Bogus Man’
- ‘Slave To Love’
- ‘This Is Tomorrow’
- ‘The Only Face’
- ‘I Thought’
- ‘Reason Or Rhyme’
- ‘Virginia Plain’
- ‘This Island Earth’
