The brilliant fun of Bryan Ferry’s The Jazz Age

When you can do anything you like, what do you do? In Bryan Ferry’s case, the answer seems to be ‘make a 1920s instrumental jazz record out of some of my old songs’. I have to admit that the mere idea of The Jazz Age (BMG), which is credited to The Bryan Ferry Orchestra, appealed to me not at all, and it seems that I wasn’t alone in this, for the record, released just before Christmas, reached only number 50 in the charts and may end up selling something adjacent to Bugger All.

The first time you play it, it’s essentially a parlour game. Which one is ‘Slave To Love’? Is that really ‘Virginia Plain’? What on earth have they done to ‘Love Is The Drug’? In fact, as always, Ferry has got all the best people in, marshalled by his long-serving musical director Colin Good, who plays piano and supplies arrangements that sound utterly authentic, to my untutored ears at least. If you do know your onions, as one slightly frothing jazzhead friend of mine seems to, there’s much nerdy pleasure to be had from the fact that this one sounds like Bix Beiderbecke, that one Duke Ellington, the other Louis Armstrong. They have even muffled the sound slightly so it sounds as though it was originally released on a 78 a very long time ago.

What really comes through, though, is the strength of Ferry’s tunes. There are some obscure album tracks here — ‘This Island Earth’ from The Bride Stripped Bare, the Eno co-write ‘I Thought’ from 2002’s Frantic, ‘Reason or Rhyme’ from the recent Olympia — but each one has a killer melody that has only been enhanced by its jazzification. In short, Ferry and his co-producer Rhett Davies have done everything right, and then let the musicians get on with it.