Jazz

Queen's Seventh Studio Album (1978)

Jazz is Queen's seventh studio album, released in November 1978. Despite its title, the album has little to do with the jazz genre. Instead, it showcases Queen at their most eclectically adventurous, incorporating hard rock, pop, funk, and everything in between.

Recording Context

The album was born out of practical necessity as much as creative ambition. Facing a hefty tax bill, Queen were forced to record outside the United Kingdom. Sessions began in July 1978 at Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes in the south of France, with production later moving to Montreux, Switzerland, the day after the local jazz festival concluded.^[1]

Roy Thomas Baker returned as co-producer for this record, reuniting with the band for the first time since A Night at the Opera in 1975. It would be the last album he produced for Queen.^[1]

Notable Tracks

The album features several of Queen's most distinctive songs. "Don't Stop Me Now," written by Freddie Mercury during this period of geographic exile and personal excess, has grown from a modest chart performer into one of the band's most beloved tracks. "Bicycle Race" and "Fat Bottomed Girls" were released as a double A-side single, with the former featuring the sound of bicycle bells and the latter celebrating a distinctly un-subtle subject matter. "Mustapha" opened the album with a multilingual vocal showcase that blended Arabic, Persian, and English.

Critical Reception

Initial critical reception was decidedly mixed. Rolling Stone's Dave Marsh dismissed the album as "more of the same dull pastiche" and infamously labeled Queen "the first truly fascist rock band."^[2] Creem magazine was similarly unkind, calling the record "absurdly dull."^[2]

Commercially, however, the album performed well, reaching number two in the UK and number six in the US. Time has been considerably kinder to Jazz than its original critics were. Loudersound ranked it as the fourth-best Queen album, and Ultimate Classic Rock placed it in third position.^[2] Its eclecticism, once seen as a weakness, is now regarded as a strength that captured the full range of what Queen could do.