Bryan Ferry: A Forward-Looking Musician Turns To The Past

by NPR STAFF, February 12, 2013 2:00 AM

Throughout his career, English musician Bryan Ferry has been one of popular music's most forward-looking performers. His band Roxy Music remodeled rock into an artsy, cosmopolitan sound in the early '70s and spearheaded the New Romantic style of the '80s.

On his latest album, though, Ferry looks to the past — a past that sounds a lot like New Orleans. The Jazz Age features instrumental recordings of some of Ferry's classic songs, performed in the style of 1920s jazz.

"For quite a few years, I've wanted to do an instrumental album of my songs," Ferry says, "something where the spotlight was on me as the songwriter rather than me as the singer."

Ferry's new album comes out Tuesday, and he'll mark the occasion in New Orleans with his first-ever Mardi Gras.

Read more: http://www.npr.org/2013/02/12/171714823/bryan-ferry-a-forward-looking-musician-turns-to-the-past?ft=1&f=1039

Bryan Ferry: The Jazz Age - exclusive album stream

Fans of Bryan Ferry well know that while he's often looked like a vision from the future – and sounded like it too, especially with Roxy Music – he's also long had a fondness for the past. We know he wears a mean tuxedo, and we've always loved his 1999 album As Time Goes By, which saw him singing Cole Porter and much else besides.

Now comes The Jazz Age, for which he has rerecorded several of his own compositions, performed by The Bryan Ferry Orchestra in the style of the 20s. And get this: he doesn't sing – they're all instrumentals.

"I started my musical journey listening to a fair bit of jazz, mainly instrumental, and from diverse and contrasting periods," Ferry said. "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 20s – the decade that became known as the Jazz Age.

"After 40 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."
From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/nov/19/bryan-ferry-jazz-age-exclusive-stream