Joe Jackson - Joe Jackson's Jumpin' Jive (A&M) Given the long blasts of silence of the last few years, you would be forgiven for thinking Joe Jackson has dropped off the pop map. In fact, he has. On his Web site, Jackson says he does not want to be a 'pop star', and doesn't want to squabble with a younger generation over MTV airtime.
Not wishing to indulge in such unseemly nonsense, Jackson went all serious about 1994, and now sees himself as a composer. These days he's into film scores and theatre - which translates as wanting to take his music to a more cerebral audience than those whose attention span feels the strain of a three-minute single.
So his most recent record, 1997's Heaven And Hell, was a 'concept' album based on the seven deadly sins; his next work will be the quasi-classical Symphony No 1.
But even before he went 'post-pop', as he calls it, Jackson was bucking trends and turning out off-the-wall records like Jumpin' Jive.
First on sale in 1981, here remastered, it has been re-released to capitalise on the US swing and jump blues revival. A tribute to the giants of the swing years, it features Jackson's covers of standards by Louis Jordan, Cab Calloway and Larry Wynn, among others.
The record jumps and jives non-stop, and as an early diversion from pop for Jackson it proves well worth revisiting now.