As 2012 draws to a close, let's look back at the outstanding albums of the year. I'm still mulling over my list of the best and worst in jazz and blues, but I have no doubt about which is the oddest.
It is a late entry, released less than a fortnight ago, titled The Jazz Age and credited to The Bryan Ferry Orchestra. Yes, that Bryan Ferry. The Roxy Music founder and lead vocalist co-produced this 13-tune collection of instrumental versions of songs he has written or co-written for his band and his solo career.
That an artist best known as a singer should have chosen not to sing on an album released under his name is only one eccentric aspect of this release. Songs such as Roxy's breakthrough single, Virginia Plain, and later hits such as Slave to Love and Avalon, have been rearranged for a 1920s-style dance band, complete with banjo, recorded with vintage microphones and mixed to good old-fashioned mono.
Ferry, a connoisseur of 1920s jazz, cites Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven, The Wolverine Orchestra featuring Bix Beiderbecke, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and The Duke Ellington Orchestra of the Cotton Club era as among the influences on these performances.
He had long wanted, he says, to do an all-instrumental project and increasingly finds the music he most likes to listen to is early jazz. "I started my musical journey listening to a fair bit of jazz, mainly instrumental, and from diverse and contrasting periods," he says.
"I loved the way the great soloists would pick up a tune and shake it up - go somewhere completely different - and then return gracefully 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."
Ferry's interest in music composed before the second world war, as well as during the rock era, was apparent from his first solo album, released in 1973, onwards. These Foolish Things took its title from a song published in 1936, and subsequent collections featured tunes by Jerome Kern, Herman Hupfeld and Cole Porter.