A band like Queen were never going to settle for a merely good take whenever they made one of their records.
There are a thousand different roads for them to go down in the studio, and they wouldn’t rest until they tried every single idea they could before getting the sound they heard in their heads. While getting those records down on vinyl was quite a feat, Brian May knew that there was a wealth of talent to explore beyond your usual rock and roll tunes as well.
If there’s one thing that defined Queen for a while, it was their unpredictability. They had a distinctive sound that no one else could copy, but when listening to them on record, they could be a lot of different things. There was their operatic side, their heavy metal side, and their showtune side, and given that all of them were done so well, it’s easy to think they could have bust out the bagpipes and made a half-decent tune with them as well.
Even if Freddie Mercury owned every single spotlight on Queen, May was the one always bringing their distinctive sound to life. What he was doing with his guitars isn’t all that different from how vocal arrangers look at their harmony parts, and even if he couldn’t always recreate everything live, there was usually an opportunity for him to make his guitar sound very un-guitar-like whenever he went out onstage.
That may have come from artists like The Beatles taking chances, but he felt that the best artists in his record collection went beyond rock altogether. He had grown up in the days when rock was a humble genre getting its feet off the ground, and while May did end up taking to bands like the Fab Four, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin, there was also a healthy dose of jazz in his household as well.
His father had already introduced him to a wealth of different songs and even taught him to play chords on his ukulele-banjo before creating the Red Special, but something about listening to The Temperance Seven felt different. This was listening to a private symphony in a jazz context, and May knew that he wanted to create similar sounds with his guitar and all the overdubs he could lay his hands on.
According to May, he could never get enough of listening to the group when he was a kid, saying, “I was mad, mad keen on this group called The Temperance Seven. They were part of the traditional jazz revival that happened in England in the ’60s. Actually, George Martin produced their 1961 album. The arrangements were deceptively loose-sounding, and yet meticulously crafted so the right harmonic changes were always there. I just fell in love with this style of arranging, and I had this dream of making that kind of sound on the guitar.”
Not every Queen song needs to have a jazz medley in the middle of it, sure, but May did have a field day learning those kinds of harmonies for tracks like ‘Good Company’. The fact that he made the whole thing with a guitar is already amazing, but it’s strange to think of every part of the instrument capturing the elements of a jazz band, like the different bends serving as horn parts and harmonics providing the sound of bells.
There are countless instances where May has used unconventional means of playing guitar, but it’s the kind of ingenuity in that song alone that could convince anyone to become interested in jazz. Because even if you don’t know the first thing about John Coltrane, Miles Davis, or Count Basie, you can listen to a virtual symphony like that and be absolutely floored that it came out of one person’s mind.
