Jazz musicians love the tribute album, perhaps more than the listeners who receive them. That opportunity to suggest affiliation, tapping into an already established audience can be tempting and a useful much needed marketing tool as industry-wide sales collapse. But really there is no reason why a tribute can't work -do it with love, for the right creative reasons, and it can still sparkle it just rarely does.

Partly this is lack of imagination-counting the money before the tunes are in the bag, but mainly it is a complete lack of awareness or even disregard of who might conceivably want to listen to the session. Who really needs to hear the work of the jazz greats performed in a dreary smooth jazz style, or maybe recast to emphasise the band leader's conviction that there had always been a kazoo element to the work of, say, Bill Evans? To make matters worse the ageing baby boomer generation has prompted the jazz tribute to cast its net wider so that we now regularly see tributes of variable quality to the likes of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Laura Nyro. David Bowie, though, has largely sidestepped the attentions of the tribute artists partly due to his particularly individual creative path, but also by dint of his relatively low mainstream commercial profile from the mid-1980s up to 2013's "The Next Day."

The arrival of lead single "Where Are We Now" from that album was almost as unexpected, then as the unqualified success of this collection from