Philip Clark at the NYRB:
As a teenager, growing up in New Jersey during the 1960s, the pianist Donald Fagen routinely took a bus into Manhattan to hear his jazz heroes in the flesh. The ecstatic improvisational rough-and-tumble of Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and Willie “The Lion” Smith stayed hardwired inside his brain, and soon Fagen landed at Bard College, where one day in 1967 he overheard a fellow student, Walter Becker from Queens, playing the blues on his guitar in a campus coffee shop. Fagen introduced himself and told Becker how impressed he was by his clean-cut technique. The pair struck up an immediate friendship, then five years later founded Steely Dan, a band that would become one of the defining rock groups of the 1970s.
In albums like Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972), Pretzel Logic (1974), and Aja (1977), they cultivated a sleek, polished pop that was marinated in jazz, blues, Latin, and rock and roll. Their songs had both a melodic, high-fidelity sheen—a gift to radio airplay—and a level of compositional integrity and instrumental elan that left aficionados agog. Lyrically, they developed a fixation—naysayers considered it an affectation—with pairing waspish observations about social outsiders, the venality of pop culture, and men riding out their midlife crises with relentlessly feel-good music, the harmonies never smudging in sympathy with the deranged words.
more here.
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