Joe Jackson's Jumpin' Jive

When the original band broke up at the end of 1980, Jackson was ill, and he spent the time listening to the jump blues and swing he had loved as a teenager. Graham Maby said later that Houghton's departure helped make the project possible, and that the new drummer, Larry Tolfree, was a big-band fanatic. With a horn section and the pianist Nick Weldon, Jackson recorded twelve songs by Louis Jordan, Cab Calloway, Lester Young, Lil Armstrong and their contemporaries at Basing Street in May 1981, producing the record himself. Anton Corbijn shot the sleeve.

It reached fourteen in Britain and forty-two in America, and the band toured it through the summer of 1981. The Rolling Stone Album Guide called it the best of Jackson's stylistic jaunts. When the swing revival took hold in America in the late 1990s, A&M remastered and repackaged it with a new cover: Wikipedia dates that edition to late 1998, the fan archive to January 1999.