Thursday, September 25, 2003 from 6 to 9 pm PT on Jazz 88 San Diego (webcast at http://KSDS-FM.org), we'll be exploring the Jazzier aspects of the music of Steely Dan with the Jazz musicians that play it everynight on the Everything Must Go tour. We'll also be finding out what these fine musicians are doing with their own musical careers by featuring music from their solo recordings. In addition to live, in-studio interviews with members of the band, we'll be playing some classic Steely Dan tracks, some newer tunes from Everything Must Go, and some of the classic Jazz tracks that Walter Becker and Donald Fagan have mentioned as influences throughout the years. And special guests may still make their presence known. It can all be heard live this Thursday, September 25, 2003 from 6 to 9 pm PT on Jazz 88, KSDS San Diego, 88.3 FM and world-wide webcast at http://KSDS-FM.org.

The page has a tentative schedule for the evening, including some of the music we're going to play. Confirmed guests include Carolyn Leonhart, Michael Leonhart, Jim Pugh, Jon Herrington, and Walt Weiskopf. We hope to add a few more choice guests to the festivities. Add your Comment[] below to let me know what you think of The Jazz In Steely Dan!
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" [base "]We were writing songs together within a day of meeting each other," Fagen says. [base "]We both had been jazz fans since we were 9 or 10 years old, listening to the same jazz shows on the radio, and we both got into soul and pop in the mid-[OE]60s.[per thou]

Fagen says the two veered towards pop because jazz was losing its appeal.

[base "]It had begun turning into an avant-garde art form,[per thou] he says. [base "]As (saxophonist) John Coltrane took jazz further out, he destroyed what jazz had been before. I understood what was happening, but I missed the more melodic and harmonic elements in jazz. Those started turning up in the pop music of the time.

[base "]The chords were the same, but the progressions were becoming more adventurous. And I also got into the blues, the direct energy of it all.[per thou]

While I would want to discuss the "destroyed what jazz had been before" statement, I totally understand and want to know what was some of the pop music that was showing him "the melodic and harmonic elements in jazz". Those are some real SD influences. What a great quote, ripe for further exploration. Love to use 'ripe' in a sentence.
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"Aja will continue to fuel the argument by rock purists that Steely Dan's music is soulless, and by its calculated nature antithetical to what rock should be. But this is in many ways irrelevant to a final evaluation of this band, the only group around with no conceptual antecedent from the Sixties. Steely Dan's six albums contain some of the few important stylistic innovations in pop music in the past decade. By returning to swing and early be-bop for inspiration -- before jazz diverged totally from established conventions of pop-song structure -- Fagen and Becker have overcome the amorphous quality that has plagued most other jazz-rock fusion attempts."

If you follow through on the obvious notion that Becker and Fagan love pop music, you can understand why modal jazz and free jazz that came after be-bop didn't do much for them. It didn't have the links to popular music structure that swing and be-bop had. There wasn't really anything from those later forms that they could use.

And Michael gets around to what I think is the be-bop meets beatnik sensibility of the lyrics of Fagan and Becker. It was cool to be a beatnik, especially if not many people really new what all your hip talk was about,

"Lyrically, these guys still seem to savor the role they must have acquired as stoned-out, hyperintelligent pariahs at a small Jewish college on the Hudson. Their imagery can become unintelligibly weird (Frank Zappa calls it "downer surrealism"); it's occasionally accessible but more often (as on the title song) it elicits a sort of deja vu tease that becomes hopelessly nonsensical the more you think about it."

For me, and I think other music lovers who want just a bit more from their music, having to think and maybe even imagine what the hell they are talking about is very Jazzy. Words and music don't necessarily have to tell a straight story, they just have to get you thinking of one yourself. And in doing that, you communicate a little something of yourself.

This article also has some other interesting takes throughout the years on Aja, which is getting some heavy consideration in the Everything Must Go tour setlist. It will be something that comes up this Thursday, on The Jazz In Steely Dan on The New Jazz Thing.
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