Bryan Ferry - The Jazz Age
Listened to the Ferry interview on BBC radio 6 about his new album. Sounds really interesting. He's recorded selected tracks from the Roxy music and his solo back catalogue, but in the style of 1920s jazz. There's no vocals, nor is it recorded with modern equipment. It actually sounds like 78 RPM. Very impressive.
Hear's a sample.
Awful idea!
The original artists of the 1920s and 1930s did not deliberately record their music to sound the way it does on old 78s. It was because it was the best technology they had at the time.
Given the chance to record and cut disks to post-war standards they would have.
I have a lot of CDs of jazz music from that era and I make allowances/adjustments for the fact that recording technology was limited until magnetic tape, better microphones, electronic amplification, valve driven cutting heads and the LP microgroove came along.
Deliberately hobbling a modern recording for the sake of an ill-conceived 1920s jazz 'aesthetic' is dubious at best.
I hope this does not catch on.
The whole ethos of jazz at the time was to be modern and different and 'dangerous', something that parents and the authorities hated.
It came out of the poor areas of towns and from brothels and from illegal drinking clubs and cut right across the black/white divide. It was NOT old (white and English) beardies in stripey blazers croaking out "When The Saints" in a shopping mall (aaarghh!!) and nor was it Bryan Ferry mocking one of the most important (or the most important) musical and cultural revolutions that ever occurred just to regurgitate his back catalogue!
I'm sure Roxy Music fans really wanted this to happen. Not!