Jazz - QUEEN*****

Mustapha/Fat Bottomed Girls/Jealousy/Bicycle Race/If You Can't Beat Them/Let Me Entertain You/Dead On Time/In Only Seven Days/Dreamer's Ball/Fun It/Leaving Home Ain't Easy/Don't Sop Me Now/Don't Stop That Jazz

Queen maintained their status as the premier rock band with the release of the misleadingly titled Jazz. It is a dazzling mixture of tracks in a variety of genres. Bicycle Race and Don’t Stop Me Now were UK top 20 hits. (US:6 UK:2)

“There is something for everyone on Jazz and it all comes together in a perfect way. The musicianship is second to none with each member at the top of his game. The vocals of all three major contributors are superb, with Freddie quite awesomely showing he can sing just about any type of song. The variety of the songs doesn’t intrude on each other, somehow they all tend to mesh together perfectly despite the wide range of influences that come into them.”

“Jazz is the culmination of Queen's super 70s trip. Extremely eclectic and manic it varies from hard rock to sweet ballads to pop rock to Arabic parodies to top 40 material. Somehow, the band managed to blend a library of musical genres into this collection. This LP sums up the free form exploratory nature of Queen's playful side. Impossible to categorise and yet eminently listenable.”

“With Jazz, the band delivered a record that remains cohesive despite being ridiculously diverse. The magic ingredient here is an overdose of bombast bordering on campiness. Queen had always been over-the-top, but here they practically become a parody of themselves.”

“Jazz marks an important transition in the development of Queen's music. At this point they were quite consciously stepping away from both glam rock and anthemic crowd pleasers, without having arrived at their future destination yet. This is not such a bad thing because, as it turns out, the transition would be more interesting than the destination.”

“This album could be considered as the bridge between the classic rock Queen sound of the seventies to the more commercial style of their eighties. Jazz is literally crammed with classic tracks, an essential listen for anyone interested in this classic British band.”