Joe Jackson recently tried to update the sound of Duke Ellington on his album Duke.
Bryan Ferry Jazz Age
Bryan Ferry is going in the opposite direction, “reimagining” some of his music as if they were recorded in the 1920’s on the album The Jazz Age.
Billed as the Bryan Ferry Orchestra, all of the songs on the album are instrumentals with arrangements based on Ferry’s fascination with the music between World War I and II. He assembled his own jazz orchestra to record the thirteen tracks that range from across his entire career from 1972’s Roxy Music to 2010’s Olympia.
Ferry said “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.”
