Ferry takes his tunes on trip to the jazz age
It could be a scene out of The Great Gatsby. In the velvet darkness of an opulently appointed nightclub, trumpets and saxophones parp and purr as a jazz band cuts through the happy chatter of the rich and beautiful and the clink of cocktail glasses, while scantily clad flappers dance in feather boas and pearls.
Then a handsome gentleman in sleek evening suit and artfully windswept hair steps up to the microphone and starts to croon that love is his drug and he needs to score, his languid vocal subtly time-shifting listeners across the musical decades.
The dapper singer is, of course, Bryan Ferry. The setting is Annabel’s nightclub, that venerable playground of London’s elite, where last week the iconic Roxy Music frontman launched his latest album, The Jazz Age, 1920sflavoured versions of some of his classic hits.
“Really, it came out of the desire to make an instrumental album of my songs,” explains Ferry. “I was fasci- nated to see how they would stand up without singing, because that almost gets too much focus. I wanted to showcase the melodies.”
He was drawn to 1920s jazz because, he says, it is almost all he listens to now. “It’s really where I started as a music lover, and as I get older I keep getting drawn back. When I started making records, I wanted to do something of our time, modern music.
“But as an interpreter of other people’s material, I’ve found that if a song is worth anything you can take it into completely different areas. A good song is very adaptable. So I suppose it was an experiment, to find out if my songs could stand that test.”
Mar-ried earlier this year (his second time) to former PR rep Amanda Sheppard, 37 years his junior, Ferry remains a timeless figure. .
In the heyday of Roxy Music, Ferry would take elements of past genres and reshape them into something so vigorously new it can still sound avant-garde 40 years on.
Jazz and blues, he says, was his entry point as a young music fan growing up in northern England in the ’50s. He warmly recalls evenings spent nursing a pint at an establishment that went by the name of the New Orleans Jazz Club. “I didn’t have any money, so I would sit with a beer all night, hoping they wouldn’t chuck me out. I was under-age anyway. They had a proper bebop band there. Occasionally you’d see someone like Eric Burdon get up — he was a really good blues singer.”
Ferry recognizes that his original enthusiasm has infused his own music. “The thing about jazz is the freedom for musicians to solo and improvise and make your songs sound better than they might have done in the first place.
Ferry doesn’t actually play on his new album, which is credited to the Bryan Ferry Orchestra. Nor does he sing. The result is quite lovely, surprising and entertaining, authentic enough to have fooled casual listeners into thinking they were ’20s originals.