I'm having such a good time, I'm having a ball!
Don't stop me now!
If you wanna have a good time, just give me a call!"
Jazz is the seventh studio album by British Glam Rock band Queen, released on 10 November 1978 through EMI in the UK and Elektra Records in the US. Recorded in Switzerland and France while the band were in tax exile, the album takes the Hard Rock sound from News of the World and reintroduces some of the more eclectic elements from the band's early albums.
The album was the band's first to feature recording at Mountain Studios in Montreaux, which was recommended to them by David Bowie, who was starting work on Lodger at the time. Both albums' recording sessions would partly overlap with one another at the building. The band would record at Mountain Studios again for Hot Space, A Kind of Magic, The Miracle, Innuendo, and Made in Heaven, and ultimately became so heavily associated with the place that in 2013, it was refashioned into the charity museum Queen: The Studio Experience.
Queen embarked on two back-to-back tours to support Jazz. The first of these, aptly titled the Jazz Tour, would encompass the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan, and recordings from it would end up on the band's first Live Album, Live Killers, in 1979. The second tour was the Crazy Tour, a smaller-scale, one-month series of shows in England, Scotland, and Ireland. The last show in this tour was merged with the Concerts for the People of Kampuchea, a series of benefit concerts organized by Paul McCartney to raise money for victims of the Cambodian-Vietnamese War.
Jazz was another commercial success for Queen, peaking at No. 2 on the UK Albums chart (out-charting News of the World there) and No. 6 on the Billboard 200. It would also be certified platinum in the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland, as well as gold in the UK, Austria, France, and Germany. However, compared to its predecessor, Queen considered this enough of an underperformance to change direction again for The Game.
Jazz was supported by four singles: "Fat Bottomed Girls"/"Bicycle Race" as a double-A-side, "Don't Stop Me Now", "Mustapha", and "Jealousy".
Tracklist:
Side One
- "Mustapha" (3:03)
- "Fat Bottomed Girls" (4:14)
- "Jealousy" (3:14)
- "Bicycle Race" (3:14)
- "If You Can't Beat Them" (4:15)
- "Let Me Entertain You" (3:01)
Side Two
- "Dead on Time" (3:23)
- "In Only Seven Days" (2:30)
- "Dreamer's Ball" (3:30)
- "Fun It" (3:29)
- "Leaving Home Ain't Easy" (3:15)
- "Don't Stop Me Now" (3:29)
- "More of that Jazz" (4:12)
Principal Members:
- John Deacon – bass, guitars
- Brian May – guitars, lead vocals ("Leaving Home Ain't Easy"), backing vocals
- Freddie Mercury – lead vocals, backing vocals, piano
- Roger Taylor – drums, percussion, lead vocals ("Fun It", "More of the Jazz"), backing vocals, electric guitar, bass
Fat bottomed tropes, they make the rockin' world go round:
- Age-Progression Song: The first verse of "Fat Bottomed Girls" depicts the narrator as a kid, the second depicts his adulthood as a famous rock singer, and the third depicts him as a retired old man, contrasting the passage of time with the constancy of his love for girls with big asses.
- As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Some of the lyrics in "Mustapha" are pseudo-Persian gibberish, mixed in with Farsi and Arabic lines.
- Call-Back: The coda for "More of that Jazz" contains small clips of previous songs on the album.
- Chubby Chaser: "Fat Bottomed Girls" is about the attraction to full-figured women.
- Continuity Nod:
- Given that "Fat Bottomed Girls" and "Bicycle Race" were both simultaneously released as a double-A-side single, they both contain nods to each other:
"Fat Bottomed Girls": "Get on your bikes and ride!"
"Bicycle Race": "Fat bottomed girls will be riding today..."- Since the final track of A Day at the Races ("Teo Torriatte") has the chorus sung in Japanese, "Let Me Entertain You" contains a reference to that:
"We'll breakfast at Tiffany's, we'll sing to you in Japanese." - Credits Gag: The liner notes credit the thunderbolt at the end of "Dead on Time" (a field recording that Brian May made during a bad storm) to God.
- "Days of the Week" Song: "In Only Seven Days" revolves around the narrator giving a day-by-day account of a week-long vacation he spends. Starting on Monday and ending on Sunday, each day corresponds with a different moment in the narrator's vacation and his romance with a girl that he meets on the beach.
- Design Student's Orgasm: The album art, inspired by graffiti that Roger Taylor saw at the Berlin Wall, depicts a series of rings inside another series of rings, with a row of cyclists at the bottom of the image. The background rings are closer together at the outer edges of the design, which gives the appearance of a frosted bubble at a distance. The back cover features a mirrored, mostly color-inverted version of the artwork (with the album title retaining its magenta color). A zoetrope
of cyclists also appears on the LP labels. - Digital Bikini: The European cover art for "Fat Bottomed Girls"/"Bicycle Race" had a picture of a nude girl on a bicycle, taken at a nude bicycle race held to promote the single. However, when the single came to America, the record company painted a bikini on the girl.
- Dirty Kid: The narrator of "Fat Bottomed Girls" claims that his love of big butts stemmed from lusting after his babysitter as a child.
- Everything Is an Instrument: The middle of "Bicycle Race" solely consists of bicycle bells chiming.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: "Mustapha" contains lyrics in Farsi and Arabic.
- In the Style of: "Dreamer's Ball" is based on the works of Elvis Presley; Brian May wrote the song as a tribute to him in light of his death the previous year.
- Lyrical Cold Open:
- "Mustapha" opens with Freddie Mercury reciting an Islamic call to prayer, nodding to his upbringing in Arabic-ruled Zanzibar (though he himself was a practicing Zoroastrian). Keeping in line with Muslim tradition, the prayer goes with zero accompaniment, with the instruments only kicking in after he's done. The intro would sometimes be incorporated into live performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" as a substitute for that song's own acapella intro (which is still too difficult for the band to reliably perform live thanks to it consisting of eight recordings of Mercury stacked together).
- "Fat Bottomed Girls" opens with the band singing the chorus unaccompanied, after which the instruments start up.
- "Bicycle Race" starts with the band chanting "bicycle" acapella three times, with Freddie Mercury responding, "I want to ride my..." before the instruments kick in.
- Multilingual Song: "Mustapha" combines lyrics in English, Arabic, Farsi, and As Long as It Sounds Foreign gibberish, harking back to Freddie Mercury's background as a Parsi man raised in Zanzibar.
- Non-Indicative Name: Queen plays various musical styles for this album. Jazz is not one of them.
- Performance Video: The music videos for "Fat Bottomed Girls", "Bicycle Race", and "Don't Stop Me Now" depict the band playing on the stage setup used for the album's supporting tour.
- Person as Verb: In "Let Me Entertain You", Freddie Mercury promises that he'll "Cruella de Vil" the listener.
- Product Placement: "Let Me Entertain You" namedrops Elektra Records and EMI, Queen's labels at the time in the US and UK, respectively.
- Record Producer: After two self-produced albums (with News of the World crediting Mike Stone as an assistant rather than a co-producer), this one saw Queen briefly reunite with Roy Thomas Baker, who had co-produced all of their albums from their debut to A Night at the Opera and was fresh off of working on The Cars' self-titled debut. While Jazz marked the band's last collaboration with Baker, it would also mark a shift back towards working with various co-producers. Queen wouldn't be credited as the sole producers on another album until 1995's Made in Heaven.
- Re-Cut:
- The original South Korean release drops "Bicycle Race" & "Let Me Entertain You" and moves "Dead on Time" to the end of side one.
- 8-track releases rearrange the song order to fit the format's four-program configuration. On such versions, the tracklist goes "Mustapha", "In Only Seven Days", "Bicycle Race", "Let Me Entertain You", "Fun It", "Leaving Home Ain't Easy", "If You Can't Beat Them", "Dead on Time", "Jealousy", "Fat Bottomed Girls", "Dreamer's Ball", "Don't Stop Me Now", and "More of That Jazz".
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: "Dead on Time" centers around someone rushing to make it to work on time during a hectic day. At the end of the song, they get struck dead by lightning before they can reach the train station.
- Shout-Out:
- "Bicycle Race" namedrops Jaws, Star Wars, John Wayne, Peter Pan, Frankenstein, and Superman during the verses.
- In "Let Me Entertain You", Freddie Mercury promises that he'll "Cruella de Vil you" with his act. The second bridge in the song also mentions how "we'll breakfast at Tiffany's."
- Step Up to the Microphone: Brian May provides lead vocals on "Leaving Home Ain't Easy", while Roger Taylor takes up the task on "Fun It" and "More of That Jazz".
- Stuffy Old Songs About the Buttocks: "Fat Bottomed Girls" is an ode to, as the title implies, women with large butts, with Freddie Mercury describing how "they make the rockin' world go round."
- Take That!: In "Bicycle Race", the narrator jabs at a couple recent blockbusters with the line "Jaws was never my scene and I don't like Star Wars."note
- Talks Like a Simile: "Don't Stop Me Now" consists of a lot of these."I'm a rocket ship on the way to Mars,
On a collision course.
I am a satellite, I'm out of control.
I'm a sex machine ready to reload
Like an atom bomb, about to whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa EXPLODE!" - Teacher/Student Romance: Ever so slightly hinted at in the first verse of "Fat-Bottomed Girls", with regards to the singer's nanny growing up.Left alone with big fat Fanny
She was such a naughty nanny
Heap big woman, you made a bad boy out of me
