The Bryan Ferry Orchestra ‘The Jazz Age’

Posted 17 Aug 2019 in Albums of 2013, Albums of the 10s, Instrumental, Jazz/ Fusion

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#1012 in the Series) is Bryan Ferry, The Jazz Age

Talk about something coming completely out of left field. I had heard nothing about this album until one day I saw it pop up on a listing of new releases for the week. What makes it more surprising is that was true even though it had been out in the UK for about three months.

The premise of The Jazz Age is quite simple. Bryan Ferry takes some of his more popular recordings and transposes them into 1920s era jazz pieces. I love the idea but I must admit that it did take me a few listens to warm to the record. It wasn’t because the music wasn’t good for it was. The playing on the all instrumental album and the arrangements are strong musically. My only beef was that it was sometimes more than a little difficult to hear the original songs when giving these a go. The themes are so different that they’re almost a completely new song now. I think I like it more for being just a nice jazz album than I do for it being a redo of Bryan’s early efforts.

I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Ferry wanted to reinterpret his own music since he’s been doing just that to others for so many years. He turned inside-out or sometimes just redid a straight version from the like of Bob Dylan, John Lennon to Cole Porter before this.

The album was produced by Bryan along with Rhett Davies. Rhett had also worked on many Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry album. He co-wrote “Don’t Stop the Dance” which is included here.

In an interview with Clash Magazine, Bryan explains the idea and the motivation: “I’ve sort of gone back to the music that I liked listening to when I was a young lad, nine or ten years old – I was really fairly precocious for that time. The first records I bought were 78s – big, proper things. Some were jazz, and I was also into the blues. When I got into making music as an artist, then I was trying to do something new, like avant-garde, or trying to create something that was different from what I’d heard before. But, at the same time, I was always looking back over my shoulder at this stuff, and all my sources, which were quite huge by the time I started making my own things. ’72 was the first record, so I had memories of so many notes flying around my head from different styles of music, and when I started doing that, I didn’t listen to jazz for, mmm, twenty years or something; a long time.”

Lastly, while Bryan Ferry helped arranged the tunes and conducts the band, he doesn’t actually appear on his own album.

–Larry Carta, Chicago, Il. USA