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Tuesday 19 April 2022

The Bryan Ferry Orchestra

The Bryan Ferry Orchestra is a retro-jazz ensemble founded and led by Bryan Ferry. They exclusively play his work in a 1920s jazz style. Ferry formed the orchestra out of a desire to focus on the melodies of his songs, and "see how they would stand up without singing". 

Bryan Ferry has recreated Roxy Music's hits as languid instrumentals for a replica 1920s jazz band – but this is more than a tourist-trip to Gatsby-land. 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. UK reeds virtuoso Alan Barnes and trumpeter Enrico Tomasso shine in an elegant lineup that reworks Avalon's crooning vocals and wah-wah guitars as gracefully wheeling clarinet sounds against brass whoops, turns the pounding of Love Is the Drug into louche brass polyphonies, and preserves Do the Strand as an invitation to dance – but to some eerie mutation of the Charleston. Ferry devotees will love it, and so might plenty of others....Some are only faintly recognisable. His hits and cult items are fashioned as they might have been in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties, or the Gatsby ballrooms of F. Scott Fitzgerald (a poster-boy of doomed romanticism to whom Ferry has never struggled to relate).
Love Is the Drug sounds completely transformed without its bass hook, yet still wickedly alluring; Slave to Love becomes a strangely jaunty jitterbug. There is cheek as well as chic here. Yet, crucially, as the pining Just Like You (his most underrated song) displays, that trademark air of desire remains....( info Edited From Wikipedia & Review by John Foldhan )










7. Slave To Love

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