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"Ferry the jazz fan and his pianist Colin Good have mixed the soulful glide of the 1927 Duke Ellington Cotton Club band, the sinister purr of 1940s film noir and those Roxy qualities that went beyond Ferry's dinner-jackets – including their adventurous song structures, which give this vintage sound a very different melodic and harmonic spin. Ferry devotees will love it, and so might plenty of others."
The Guardian
The Guardian
BRYAN FERRY
“I started my musical journey listening to a fair bit of jazz, mainly instrumental, and from diverse and contrasting periods” explains Ferry.
“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.”
PAUL COLIN - THE ARTWORK
PAUL COLIN - THE ARTWORK
The artwork for The Jazz Age album is comprised of illustrations by the renowned French poster artist Paul Colin. Born in 1892, Colin enjoyed a career spanning over 40 years.
Breathing new life into the art of the poster – Colin’s work brilliantly evokes the music, dance and reckless energy of the Jazz Age. Seeking to re-embrace life, Parisians saw African-American music and dance as a regenerative force, and Colin brought the Jazz Age visually alive with his bold posters of the performers at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees.
Influenced by cubism, Colin’s images arrest attention with their appearance of movement and strong, exaggerated lines; they capture, perhaps more than any other works of art, the wild, carefree mood of the Roaring Twenties.
In 1925 a cast of musicians and dancers known as La Revue Nègre exploded onto the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, captivating audiences with the wild movement of erotic new dances like the Charleston.
Inspired by their popularity, Colin celebrated these dancers in a portfolio of 45 hand-coloured lithographs entitled Le Tumulte Noir, portraying the Parisian infatuation with these performers. It was here that Colin first encountered the bewitching Josephine Baker during a rehearsal in which she performed wearing little more than a string of feathers around her waist and neck. They became lovers, life-long friends, and she his muse.
Colin’s strong, dynamic images still transport us back into the heady swing of the Jazz Age.