The Jazz Age Review - Thu 14th Feb
The Bryan Ferry Orchestra
The Jazz Age
STYLES: trad jazz, Dixieland,
putting on the retro-Ritz
OTHERS: Duke Ellington, The Caretaker, F.
Scott Fitzgerald
Imagine a disembodied pair of jazz hands. Now imagine
that those hands, as they flutter and preen, are bringing the world into
existence, tweaking the air here and grabbing it there as they create
experience. And those hands have also created themselves, white gloves from
whole cloth, ex nihilo.
Now, play that image in reverse. Those
disembodied hands are not creating, but destroying the world, pulling it down
and into itself until it disappears to an event horizon, then a dot which
becomes a mere speck of dust on a tailored forefinger.
Which is it to be?
We could say that there is no such thing as a simple act of creation or
destruction — one encompasses and produces the other, endlessly. We live in an
age in which a lack of destruction is itself the cause of destruction. As data
pile up to unmanageable quantities, pop has no choice but to eat itself,
Ouroboros-like, and grow fat in the process. Music lives (so the lament goes),
but only as a monstrous revenant, capable of mimesis and mitosis, but not
reproduction. Meld those two hands, mirror clones, into one, and then multiply
them to a dazzling Busby Berkeley figure of intricate complexity, a
snowflake.
A snowdrift piles up and becomes a thing, and the question
becomes: in this bereft yet cornucopian circumstance, whence the material from
which creation can occur? From what ground can clay be gathered and fashioned,
when creation — making there what was not there — is precisely what is in
question? Bryan Ferry is nothing if not elegant — indeed, he embodies “nothing
if not elegant.” And in The Jazz Age, he has found an elegant solution to this
problem: 20s-style jazz covers of his own material. Ferry’s choices span his
career (up to and including “Reason or Rhyme” from 2010’s Olympia) and encompass
both Roxy Music and solo numbers. Some Ferry standards are virtually
unrecognizable (“Love Is The Drug,” “Virginia Plain”), while others are
transformed into their opposite (“The Bogus Man,” from a nine-minute hypnotic
exploration, becomes a charming 128-second shuffle). Others hew closer to the
original, the standout being a devil-may-care “Slave To Love.”
The Jazz
Age both embodies Ferry’s political conservatism — a return to a nostalgic past,
a valorization of what is now canonical — while also referring to an (or perhaps
the) era of “cool.” The choice to record such an album in itself reflects this
division: on the one hand, slavishly recreating the past is now precisely what
pop music does; while on the other, the unusual particularity of the age and
aesthetic chosen for reconstruction works against the typical paradigm — as does
the holus-bolus reinterpretation of one’s own work, a kind of self-cannibalism
(Ouroboros redux) but with a side of Baby Ruths and Wonder Bread. Ferry and
other seminal artists of his time (most notably Bowie) have, paradoxically,
taken reinvention as their only fixed point. On The Jazz Age, then, we have a
literal reinvention of Ferry’s own material, but one embodied in the absolutely
and unashamedly unoriginal, and in delving back ever closer to the zero point of
popular music — which seems like a logical endpoint to the process.
The
project can easily be compared to other left-fieldly archaic interpretations and
cratediggings — R. Crumb’s justifiably well-received compilation That’s What I
Call Sweet Music, for example. I was consistently reminded of The Jolly Boys’
Great Expectation, a Mento (pre-ska Jamaican folk) interpretation of indie
standards from Iggy Pop to Amy Winehouse. And there is a precedent within
Ferry’s own oeuvre, in his long-held penchant for jazz standards — think of
1999’s As Time Goes By.
But in another sense, The Jazz Age is more
fruitfully understood through the lens of acts like The Caretaker (in much the
same way as Ferry’s regrettable album of Dylan covers might be reinterpreted as
a soundtrack to Todd Haynes’ Dylan art-biopic I’m Not There). Admittedly, the
album is not overtly to be considered an avant-garde project, but neither should
it be thought of as a novelty piece. Rather than Leyland Kirby’s careful, subtle
manipulation of the melodies and crackles of vintage 45s, Ferry is working with
the jazz genre itself considered as loopy, a deconstruction that transposes one
lushness (that is, Ferry’s signature style) for another. And the distressed
patina of age is not re-presented, but purposefully reconstructed — not so much
shabby chic as swanky chic — the heartache without which no dream home is now
complete.
But there’s a final void at the center of the work: for many,
Ferry’s voice is the drug, and The Jazz Age is haunted by its doubly-disembodied
absence. Indeed, collapsing absence upon absence, not only does Ferry not sing
on the album; he does not play at all. And it’s this very lack, a sonically
literal death of the author, which finally and absolutely redeems the piece from
the whiff of gimmickry and makes its sound come alive. In his book Sinister
Resonance, David Toop suggests that sound itself (let alone recorded sound) is a
haunting. But what we have on The Jazz Age is music that’s haunting itself. And
as if that wasn’t paradoxical enough, the ghost is older than its own embodiment
— which it thereby sets in aspic. It’s a return trip from this side of
paradise.=