For Your Pleasure

Bryan Ferry’s musical colors come to New Orleans.

Tours by aging rock icons are nothing new, especially at Jazz Fest time. Bryan Ferry is one of the few who’s grown with his material. From the start, Roxy Music was a band out of time—appropriating pre-rock glamor at first with heavy irony, but ultimately revealing themselves as romantics. Ferry’s live shows nowadays include everything from the angular artrock of the first Roxy album to Dylan and Jerome Kern covers to new solo material, all of which he inhabits with impeccably cool swagger.

I talked to Ferry on his previous trip to the USA last fall.

This is your third US tour in three years. You turned 71 last year, and have been working hard as ever. What’s the secret?

There’s no secret to longevity, I’ve just been lucky, really. I don’t follow any weird diets or anything like that. I do have a Pilates teacher that I see three times a week; the rest is just trying to keep busy. I just like to work, I like making music and I like sharing with the audiences. I used to much prefer being in the studio, because you always want to be doing new work. But now I have so much work to perform that I really like the performance side of it, plus I have a band that’s very good. With three guitars you can add a lot of different musical colors so you don’t get bored.