Anyone who has been in my presence for 15 seconds knows that I love Queen. Queen is one of my most favorite bands of all time, if not THE most favorite.
I recently had the pleasure of seeing the Queen Extravaganza perform (in Oh-Little-Town-of Bethlehem, PA). I cannot say enough about how incredibly good the show was. The show was 3 hours long, with only a 20-minute intermission period. The rest of the time was pure entertainment. Unbelievable vocals from 5 different singers, with insanely good accompaniment on guitars, keyboards, drums, etc. The feel of the show was definitely something any Queen fan could appreciate -- it was ALL about the music. They performed songs that I don't even think Queen themselves did in concert very often, if at all: March of the Black Queen, and Lap of The Gods I and II. If you can catch the show, I highly recommend it. I screamed and sang myself hoarse.
My sister and I after screaming our lungs out for an hour and a half.
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I own every Queen album on CD, which is not a great feat, by any means. But seeing the Queen Extravaganza motivated me to revisit my Queen music library and reacquaint myself with their awesomeness. One of my favorites is Jazz. Jazz is the follow-up album to Queen's HUGELY successful News of the World, which produced a couple songs you might have heard of: We Will Rock You and We Are the Champions. Jazz, though not as widely or wildly successful as its predecessor, has some fantastic songs on it (as the title of this post suggests), and other songs that did not make it to radio play but are no less great. Leavin' Home 'Aint Easy comes to mind. Some will remember Don't Stop Me Now as the hilarious zombie-fighting theme song from the movie Shaun of the Dead, which hails from the Jazz album as well.
Anyway, Jazz has one of the most interesting and artistic album covers I've ever seen. And I think it's particularly unique when compared to their other covers or to the covers of their contemporaries in 1978.
Because of all of the above, I decided to design a scarf based on Queen's Jazz album. It's a super long, funky, textural piece of modern art, if I may be so bold. I enjoyed designing it and knitting it. The pattern is available for free on Ravelry. If you don't have Ravelry access and still want it, comment and give me your e-mail address and I'll send it to you. I'm too dumb and lazy to figure out how to make PDFs available from my blog. Heh.
Some photos:
