“Part of my childhood”: How Brian May created a jazz band on one guitar
Queen was never a band to put parameters around what they thought their songs should sound like. They had their primary influences in rock and roll, but some of the biggest parts of their career came from them working outside the box, whether that was taking on something operatic like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or having the guts to turn towards pop music on tracks like ‘Another One Bites the Dust’. But Brian May was always looking to explore, and after reminiscing on what a jazz band could sound like as a kid, he managed to turn himself into a one-man ensemble for this tune.
Looking back at what May did on guitar, though, it’s safe to say that he was one of the resident geniuses of 1970s rock. Outside of the massive harmonies they layered on top of everything, hearing him put different guitar parts on each other until they sounded like a distorted choir felt like being hit with a wall of noise every time you turned on the radio.
And that kind of layered sound wasn’t done by accident, either. Every one of Queen’s records gave May an excuse to go wild in the studio, and whether that was listening to the massive delay settings on ‘Brighton Rock’ or going full-on dance-hall during the guitar break on ‘Lazing On a Sunday Afternoon’, May was never afraid to throw snippets of a tune and see what happened with it.
By the time they worked on A Night at the Opera, there was nothing else that was out of their disposal. Since ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was already Freddie Mercury’s masterpiece, his contributions like ‘39’ and ‘The Prophet’s Song’ were a way for him to stretch his muscles in every genre he could think of, whether that was folk or prog-rock.
For the song ‘Good Company’, though, May turned in the kind of performance that came from his jazz background. Despite playing most of the song on a ukulele banjo that he inherited from his father, the guitar break is straight out of left field, including various turnarounds encompassing everything a jazz band should be.
For May, this was a way to pay tribute to his childhood, saying, “That’s very much a part of my childhood, the Dixieland jazz band. [That] was revived when I was a kid. There was a group called the Temperant Seven who played a mixture of Dixieland and very arranged pseudo-1920s music, and I learned a lot of my arrangements from those guys. So when it came to do the solo part on ‘Good Company’, I wanted it to sound like a jazz band.”
So, when working through the solo, it’s easy to hear every single piece of the band coming out of May’s overdubs. There are definitely sections that stick out more than others like horn breaks, but hearing him get harmonics to sound like bells and using a slide to mimic the sound of a trombone is one of the more ingenious things that Queen had ever put out.
And considering this was coming from the same person who would one day write ‘We Will Rock You’, May had one of the starkest contrasts in the group, being able to make music out of something primitive as well as layer countless tracks on top of each other until they sounded right. It might sound jazzier than anything that actually made it onto Jazz, but it hardly mattered as long as it sounded this infectious.
