Like most of our Classic Platter participants, The Smalls vocalist Mike Caldwell had a hard time picking his all-time favourite album (come on, quick, can you do it?). After some careful thought, the singer of the ’90s punk/metal/alt rock hybrid band from Edmonton, Alberta, who recently got back together for a reunion tour, decided to pick another genre-bending band, and perhaps the most genre-bending band of all time. Caldwell’s Classic Platter is by Queen, and it’s their oft-forgotten seventh album, Jazz, which was originally released in 1978.
Caldwell: It’s tough to narrow it down to just one, and might change from month to month, but one album that comes to mind that I always come back to, ever since I was a child, is an album Queen put out called Jazz. Have you heard that one?
No, I don’t think I have. But I’ve heard a lot of their albums.
Yeah, it has “Fat Bottomed Girls” and “Bicycle Race” et cetera on it. So there would have been certain times in my life where I would choose that album, for sure.
It’s funny because for Queen I’d always choose one of their Greatest Hits, because it has all of those classic songs, but their studio albums are really good, too, even the deep cuts. So what is it about that particular Queen album that does it for you?
To me, it’s a little bit like The Smalls, in their way, of course. They’re Queen, so they have all of those different influences, but they manage to cram them into their own rock style. They have the jazzy influence, and that parlour-sound influence, and their blues influence, and everything else, and they manage to incorporate those into their rock songs, and they just do that really well on that record. There’s some heavier stuff on there… it’s just a good package. I like every song on it.
The Smalls are currently on a Canadian reunion tour. The dates are listed here.
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