“In 1990, Joe Jackson had just signed a spiffy new deal with Virgin Records after spending 10 years and 11 albums under A&M,” (Popdose). “Many bands use the first album with a new label as an opportunity to make a fresh start and try new things (or, perhaps, sell out) … Jackson, however, had no interest in changing, diminishing returns be damned.”
After his 1982 album Night and Day, featuring the hit “Steppin’ Out,” was certified Gold in the UK, the US, and New Zealand and Platinum in Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands, it would likely have been difficult to achieve anything other than “diminishing returns.” But Jackson has seemed most interested in following his own muse rather than sustaining stardom, wrapping insightful and often cutting lyrics in musical styles ranging from edgy pop to jazz-inflected cabaret ballads, from textbook New Wave to uptempo salsa. “In his 1999 memoir A Cure for Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage, Joe Jackson writes approvingly of George Gershwin as a musician who kept one foot in the popular realm and one in the classical realm of music,” (AllMusic). “Like Gershwin, Jackson possesses a restless musical imagination that has found him straddling musical genres unapologetically, disinclined to pick one style and stick to it.”
Although Jackson, a UK native, has often toured with smaller bands — at times even paring the instrumentation down to his trademark piano/bass/drums trio — this larger band format shows the effortless precision that Jackson is known for. The spirited “Jamie G.” features a late unprepared half-step modulation at 2:03.
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