Roxy Music, the British band that thrived in the 1970s, built its audience - and then lost parts of it - by creating and then quickly confounding expectations. With a lineup that included the guitar, bass and drums standard in rock, as well as the electronica pioneer Brian Eno, and a reed player, Andy Mackay, whose oboe and saxophone lines gave the group a distinctive sound, Roxy Music often put a futuristic gloss on traditional song forms.
But the band’s driving force was Bryan Ferry, its principal songwriter, lead singer and sometime keyboardist and architect (by way of his art school friend Antony Price) of the group’s glamorous visual style. Ferry pursued a solo career concurrent with his Roxy work and after the band split up in 1983. As a way of celebrating four decades of songwriting and performing Ferry, 67, has released The Jazz Age, a retrospective of sorts.
Many of Ferry’s best-known songs are included, from early Roxy Music hits like “Virginia Plain” and “Do the Strand,” as well as “Avalon,” the title song from the group’s final album, to recent solo work like “Reason or Rhyme” from Olympia (2010). But there is a twist. Ferry and Colin Good, a pianist he has worked with since the late 1990s, have arranged the songs in the style of 1920s jazz, a fascination of Ferry’s since his childhood in Tyne and Wear, in northern England.
On The Jazz Age, the Bryan Ferry Orchestra performs the songs as instrumentals.
Q: You have said that you’ve long wanted to make an instrumental album, but why did you settle on 1920s jazz as the style of this one?
A: Two or three years ago I might have done it as an orchestral thing, with strings. But I’ve been listening over the last few years to a lot of Louis Armstrong - the early Hot Five and Hot Seven things, and him with King Oliver as well. And some [Duke] Ellington. Those were the chief inspirations.
Louis Armstrong’s things are more for discreet soloists, playing quite an earthy, improvised music. The Ellington stuff is more arranged and sophisticated, more orchestrated and more urbane. On others we wanted a more basic, New Orleans feeling.
Q: This is a style you first encountered as a child?
A: In 1955 I was 10 years old, and that’s when I started hearing New Orleans jazz.
I used to deliver newspapers, before and after school, and I had these jazz magazines, like Melody Maker, Jazz Monthly, and I’d read assiduously as I was walking down the street, learning about the music. So I read about it more than I listened to it because I couldn’t afford that many [ records]. But it was on the radio. There were a couple of kind of hit records. “Bad Penny Blues,” by Humphrey Lyttelton was one record I remember having as a 78 at home, which I bought with my pocket money.
And once I listened to these English bands I wanted to go to the source, to Armstrong and the others. I ended up really being a huge Charlie Parker fan. That’s where I got my love of jazz actually. And then Ornette Coleman after that. But Parker was my hero. And Billie Holiday, the singer, I never tire of listening to.
Style, Pages 54 on 03/10/2013