BLACK JACKET SYMPHONY RECREATES CLASSIC QUEEN
Marc Martel has been singing a long time. He even won four Juno Awards — the Canadian equivalent of the Grammy — with his band Downhere.
But he never discovered his true vocal range until he took on Freddie Mercury.
He has spent much of the past seven years imitating the legendary front man in tributes to the classic rock band Queen. He will be at the Harrison Opera House in Norfolk this weekend with a show that provides a note-for-note recreation of Queen’s “A Night at the Opera” album.
“Doing Freddie’s vocals on stage has helped me explore some tones in my voice that I didn’t even know where there,” Martel said in a phone interview from backstage in Jackson, Miss. “I’ve had to learn about good vocal health, because he wrote a lot of melodies that were just living at the top of his physical range.
“It’s comforting for me to go back and watch old Queen footage from the late 1970s and early ’80s, because Freddie would avoid those high notes. He would do it in the studio, but on stage night after night it takes a toll. Black Jacket Symphony often does two or three shows in a row and I have to be careful getting the right sleep and hydration. Honestly, after the last seven or eight years of doing Queen music, I’m a much stronger vocalist.”
Martel, 42, was picked in 2011 by Queen’s drummer, Roger Taylor, to be the lead vocalist in the Queen Extravaganza, a touring tribute act that officially was sponsored by the original band members. He later developed his own tribute band, the Ultimate Queen Celebration. (How well does he replicate Mercury’s voice? He provided some of the vocals that you hear in the award-winning film “Bohemian Rhapsody.”)
Black Jacket Symphony, based in Alabama, has more than 100 musicians on its roster and puts together combinations to go on tour recreating classic rock albums such as Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” AC/DC’s “Back in Black” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours.” For performances of “A Night at the Opera,” Martel provides lead vocals as part of a seven-part ensemble.
That size of that lineup is critical when it comes to performing the album’s climax, and the band’s magnum opus, “Bohemian Rhapsody” — a 6-minute tour de force that juxtaposes pop melodies, metal guitar solos and elaborately overdubbed operatic vocal passages. It’s a legendary masterpiece of studio technique, and Queen found it impossible to adequately perform on stage with its four-man lineup. For a full minute in the middle of the song, the band would cut the stage lights and play the portion of the recording that they could not reproduce live.
Black Jacket Symphony, with three extra musicians and vocalists, performs the song as it was recorded.
“Our goal is obviously not quite the same as Queen’s goal back in the day,” Martel said. “Being just four guys and being the original artists, they could get away with doing whatever they wanted, so they would play the track of the middle choir parts and the lighting engineer had fun with the stage lights. But our goal is to replicate the original recording itself as close as possible.
“It’s very challenging. The chord changes are weird, not intuitive, but somehow it works magically. With seven people on stage, we do a pretty good job of covering all the choir parts. It works, man. We’ve got it down pat.”
That song is not the only challenging part of the show. Queen’s 1975 album was ambitious in its conception and production, requiring additional tracks and some studio trickery to squeeze in all of the vocals and instrumentation in the arrangements. In addition to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the album produced another big hit in “You’re My Best Friend,” as well as several album tracks that became big parts of the band’s lore, such as “I’m in Love with My Car,” the opening “Death on Two Legs,” and “The Prophet’s Song.”
As always, Black Jacket Sympony’s show in Norfolk will consist of two sets. The first will be the recreation of “A Night at the Opera,” with no chatter between songs — the goal, Black Jacket Symphony spokesman Jason Rogoff said, is to be “as if you just dropped the needle on the album and played it.” The second set is wall-to-wall Queen hits.
Unlike many tribute acts, the members of Black Jacket Symphony do not try to look or move like the original performers on stage. It is all about the sound of the music.
“When I first started performing these songs, the greatest relief to me as a performer was that I didn’t have to sell the music every night,” Martel said. “When I play my own music, if I’m lucky, half the audience might know two or three songs. With Queen, everyone knows the music as well as we do. When we end with ‘We Are the Champions’ it’s a grand old singalong. It’s like leading the worship music at church. That’s a good feeling.”