-
I have been appreciating Steely Dan's body of work in a big way lately. Complex compositions with many subtle harmonies, often difficult to play on guitar (for me anyway). Their tunes are often more complicated than 3/4 of the tunes in the Real Book.
So what makes them "not jazz"? Probably the catchy backbeat, the gnarly blues-based guitar solos, the often bizarre lyrics, the pop music compositional hooks. Their work seems to be its own unique genre.
Anyway, check out this 1990s Donald Fagen jazz-rock piano instructional video. Thanks for any commentary.
-
04-08-2024 12:22 PM
-
I love Steely Dan.one of the most original and unique bands of all time.For me it doesn't matter if it's jazz or not,their music just grooves.Thanks for the link,the video looks interesting.
-
Me too, back in 1976. And still today.
Originally Posted by TF
Lot's of studio/jazz musicians on their tunes. Often times, in the early years, the horn arrangements where done by jazz composers. Larry Carlton often acted as a musical director for the rhythm section. There is a Jazz Big Band approach to chord progression, especially in the later years.
-
They’re not just difficult for you. They went through truly great guitar players like a hot knife through butter. The solo in “Peg” was recorded by eight of the absolute best, each called in to try after Fagen and Becker weren’t satisfied with the last one. Jay Graydon finally pleased them enough to make it to the record.. We don’t know for sure who the 7 rejects were, but it had to be at least some of their regulars - Baxter, Dias, Khan, Carlton, Herington, Ford, Randall etc. Originally Posted by TF
Jazz had lyrics that weird when Fagen and Becker were on justgleams in their parents’ eyes. Put a little frim fram sauce on it, then straighten up and fly right Originally Posted by TF
Here’s a nice article about their adventures with the world’s best guitarists.
-
No swing. No blues. No improvisation. No standards. No suits.
-
thanks for that vid of Fagin
i watched the section on chain lightning’ and will deffo go back to it
I’m learning Pretzel Logic atmo
so it is VERY interesting to get inside
his head a bit ….
I don’t find it easy to grok Fagin’s harmony but it is very very cool
so worth the effort
(for me some kind of similarity to
Metheny’s ‘triads over bass notes’
slash chord approach to writing)
-
Their stuff is so much fun to play. People love it. And learning Steely Dan tunes has made me a better musician. Have probably played a dozen of them on gigs.
I’m going to suggest “3rd World Man” for a new band I’m in.
-
Fagen and Becker were jazz freaks who felt that the jazz of the 50s was the greatest music in the world, but felt that after that, jazz had lost its appeal for them, so they got into R&B and some types of pop music (Bachrach's Land of Make Believe was DF's fave tune in the 1960s.
Becker died listening to a Dexter Gordon album. They wanted guitarists who could hang with their sophisticated harmony, but still play the blues and rock out, like Carlton and Herrington.
Skunk couldn't deal with the jazz harmony part, bu Denny Dias could, so he stayed with them a little longer.
They wanted Elliot Randall to join SD, but he turned them down (he was a student of Sal Salvador, and Dias was a student of Billy Bauer).
They tried to use Mark Knopfler for "Time Out of Mind", but it took eleven hours of being taunted by DF and WB to get fourteen seconds of music out on MK! The rest was done by the usual studio guys they used, Hugh McCracken, etc...Grant Green was Becker's fave guitar player.
I just read the Fagen's bio "The Nightfly", and he's gotten over some issues he used to have, and won't play digital keyboards, or use drum machines, and most types of digital recording devices and techniques anymore.
He believes that if he gets good players, they can get a superior sound out of analogue recording studios , compared to digital stuff.
-
They were awesome and weird and wonderful.
There is a video that goes through the rejected Peg solos, as I recall. Any of them would have been a keeper, IMO.
And, you can’t argue with the results, but if they had been 50% less OCD they would have gotten 95% of the results they got and probably been more productive. JMO.
I am hearing the solos to My Old School in my mind as I type this. One of the great guitar solos in rock music. The Skunk. Now THAT was a band.
-
One of the forgotten SD contributors was Victor Feldman. I think it might be Aja where Victor is the only person who played on every track. Walter doesn't appear on about 3 of those tracks and on one Donald just sings but doesn't play keys. Even Chuck Rainey is missing on one track.
-
Jim Mullen is a big Steely Dan fan, I’ve seen him play their tunes occasionally. He recorded an instrumental version of Aja - I think I saw him playing this at the Brecon Jazz Festival once. (He also played a bossa version of Nessun Dorma!)
As I recall I had a chat with him after that gig (it was very informal, in a small hotel lounge) and that’s when he told me how much he likes SD.
-
Yes there’s some really nice piano work by Victor Feldman on that album. Originally Posted by Banksia
-
That guitar solo is one of the few that I consider so iconic that I play it pretty much note for note. People really dig it and I get a lot of compliments, which seems strange to me. Originally Posted by Doctor Jeff
I mean, it does require a bit of technique, but it’s just copying.
-
Loved Steely Dan since first hearing "Reelin' In The Years" on a transistor radio. (And no, I was not stomping on the avenue by Radio City with a large sum of money to spend.) I was thirteen.
Obviously, we focus most on the music here, as we should, and there's a lot to like about that music. But I also liked the way Fagen's lyrics included references to other performers and other songs. I used to think one could build a song with references to other songs (-titles, lyric lines and phrases) with just a wee bit of glue to piece them together.
And once upon a time, I did just that. It's a slow, bluesy piece (but not a 12-bar bluesy piece.)
Here is the lyric.
SinatraSongs
Words& Music by Mark Rhodes
(1999)
Feelthe ebb tide; hear that ill wind?
“Makeit one for my baby,” my friend.
Anythinggoes, travellin' light
I'mstill in the still of the night
[Interlude]
Southof the Border, in Monterrey,
Atangerine peeled my skin away:
Oldblack magic; witchcraft;
Dayin, day out, they all laughed.
Whennight comes punching like ten King Kongs
Ibeat it back with Sinatra songs:
WhenI'm in the tank
Idial up Frank.
Afoggy day on the Isle of Capri
Theycan't take that away from me;
Angeleyes caught the summer wind--
Iwish I were in love again.
Ebbtide's crested, ill wind's mum.
“Makeit one for the road,” old chum.
Thegirl next door, swingin' down the lane
Myblues in the night just took a trip on a train.
Whennight comes punching like ten King Kongs
Ibeat it back with Sinatra songs
WhenI'm in the tank
Idial up Frank.
-
Favorite jazz covers of Steely Dan tunes?
-
Walter Becker used to sneak into jazz clubs when he was only fifteen, and met Victor Feldman around that time, and they became friends. Originally Posted by grahambop
He either played vibes of keyboards on every SD album.
They made up stories about why they stopped touring (the equipment wasn't sophisticated enough, etc...), but the real reason was Fagen had some type of breakdown on their tour of the UK. Panic attacks were a problem with him ever since he was a kid.
Rather than get treatment, he decided to stop touring, and he and WB fired the whole band, and they decided to use just studio musicians (except for Dias) for their records after that.
Fagen was still sick, but he felt safe in the studio. However, he developed an obsession with perfectionism, known to be a symptom of people with his condition, and made the studio a living hell for people who worked with him. A woman recording engineer, asked to be taken off the job on Aja, because he spent two days on the words "WELL THE" on the song "Home At Last"! Becker usually took some of the stress off of him, but he was getting addicted to heroin.
They started hiring and firing complete bands if they didn't like what was being played. It might be just one tiny drum beat that was out of time, but they'd fire the entire band, even if what they were playing otherwise was fine! In a typical day, three or four bands would be hired and fired by Fagen, but he'd get Gary Katz to do the firing.. They'd send the guys in the bands one by one to Katz who would give them a check, and tell them they wouldn't be needed anymore.
They manged to make it through Aja still functional, but they still had one more album left to make for ABC (MCA) records to complete their contract.
Gaucho was the straw that broke the camel's back. Becker was a full blown heroin addict, and couldn't help Fagen anymore. He later got run over by a car, when he pushed his GF out of the way, and broke his bones in six different places. Then an assistant recording engineer accidentally erased all of the work they had done so far on the album, including the title song "The Second Arrangement", and they couldn't do it again, no matter how hard they tried. Fagen was forced to write more songs for the album. The bootleg of the original album is available on You Tube.
Fagen recycled songs that were cut from other albums ("Third World Man" was originally a song about civil rights!) and ripped off a Keith Jarrett tune for the intro of "Gaucho"(his name now appears on the credits for that song). Fagen drove Jeff Porcaro so nuts on "Gaucho", that he started throwing all his drumsticks against the wall of the studio. Finally Fagen just gave up and left the studio. Rob Mounsey had to be called in as arranger and pianist to finally get the song done.
They weren't happy with the rhythm tracks for three of the songs, and they had to call on Roger Nichols to invent a drum machine for 150K called "Wendel". They used it on three tunes on the album, two of which sucked, IMHO and "Hey, Nineteen" which worked out okay because they were trying to make it sound mechanical. The good songs on Gaucho all used real drummers, with the title tune consisting of a mix of 46 takes of drumming! Becker's GF wound up ODing in bed with WB, and he was sued by her parents.
Fagen describes in the book "Nightfly", "I fell apart like a cheap suit after finishing that album". He went into therapy, and was put on anti-depressants, which blocked the panic attacks he suffered from, and was able to tour again. He still takes them today.
-
All of the WDR Big Band's recordings of their songs with arr. done by Vince Mendoza. He left out only one of the good ones, so I did a chart on it. Originally Posted by Mick-7
-
How many FM radio tunes did Wayne Shorter play on?
Arranged this a few years ago
<u>
-
Wow. I consider myself a die hard Dan fan but you have details here I've never heard. Any suggestions for reading/material?
Originally Posted by sgcim
-
I discovered the Dan back in the 90's when my contemporaries were listening to far more mundane music. I had no idea then, only a bit more now, what drew me to their music. There's not much more that can written about the complexity, subtetly, and simplicity of their music.
Beyond the music, lyrically they create an amazing world of drug dealers, pimps, cheating wives, in tales of sorrow, regret, woe, and irony. Genius work, nearly all of it, created by two, at times, very troubled individuals.
Jazz? Rock? Blues? No matter. Fagan and Becker are musical giants who readily acknowledge standing on the shoulders of the greats before them.
For my listening, I can't find a better solo anywhere than Carlton's work on or the opening of 'Don't Take Me Alive' with equally amazing guitar work.
The genius simplicity of Peg's chord progression.
The ironic, disturbing, and timeless story of 'Haitian Divorce'. Please Google the lyrics, you may be shocked but not disappointed.
What more can be said about the opening of
So go ahead and crack some Cuervo Gold, find some fine Columbian (coffee, lol) and make tonight a wonderful night.
-
The mU chord. Or is it Mu.
-
I didn’t get the Dan until about a year ago. It only clicked when I started listening to the words.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
-
You should be congratulated for investigating the stories that the lyrics tell. The book I read concerning their lyrics was "Quantum Criminals" a recent book by Alex Papdemus. We used to play poker listening to SD records, and I had no idea that "Everyone's Gone to the Movies" was about a pedophile! Originally Posted by Prof Silverhair
There's all types of sleaze oozing out of many of their songs, and they're so cleverly written, that unless you study them closely, you're not aware of how warped they are.
A lot of their songs were written about personal stories that happened to them in NYC, when they were hustling for the only guy that took their music seriously back then, Kenny Vance, a member of Jay and the Americans, who were all mobbed up. Jay Black used to go to the track and gamble all their money away. He was so in debt to the mob, that he would've been rubbed out if he wasn't so popular with them due to his singing.
When DF and WB toured with them, they'd be traveling on the bus with guys who just got out of jail, and their reward for not ratting anyone out was to get to tour with Jay and the Americans, and pick up chicks, go out drinking, etc...
The other book I read was also pretty recent, "The Nightfly" a bio of DF written by Peter Jones, a British jazz pianist and vocalist.
He goes more into the musical aspects of DF, and SD.
DF did have classical training as a kid when he took piano lessons, but he got into jazz, so his muscles in his fourth and fifth fingers were never really developed if he had stayed with classical.
It's never been stressed that he was a music major at Bard, when he was gigging with several bands that he led there. He started out as a Lit major, but he was doing so well with all of his bands, that he figured he could probably make it as a musician.
He studied theory, orchestration and composition with Jacob Druckman, and concentrated on Early Music (hence the intro to "Josie) and composers that destroyed classical music, like Stravinsky and Alban Berg.
Eventually, they kicked him out of the music dept., because he was doing so much work in NYC as a session musician, songwriter (for Kenny Vance), and an arranger, that he stopped attending music classes. The funniest thing about his experience as a music major was his required performance for a jury of teachers there. Instead of a classical piece, he gathered together an army of guitarists, bassists, drummers and keyboard players and performed Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" for almost an hour! LOL! When they finally finished, the music faculty just sat there in stunned silence!
My oldest sister used to go out to clubs on Lawnguyland, and she brought home a boyfriend who was a guitar/bass player. I was just starting out with guitar lessons, and he was studying with a local guy named Joe Monk. My teacher had studied with Monk, and i asked him what Monk was like.
He said he was a really funky guy. I asked him, "he plays funk music?" He laughed, and said, "No man, he's just really funky".LOL!
Anyway, I didn't know it then, but this guy was the bass player for a LI band named Demian, and he turned out to be the bass player that Walter Becker replaced when they answered that famous ad in the Village Voice music classified section for a bass player and keyboard player.
"Must have jazz chops. No assholes need apply". He left the jazz-rock band because he went away to college. DF and WB played some of their songs in Denny Dias' kitchen for their audition, and they were immediately accepted. DF and WB fired the drummer, and took over the band, hence creating SD.
-
Yes ! amazing solos on My old school Originally Posted by Gilpy;[URL="tel:1329277"
well done for copping it at all man
(i wouldn’t even attempt that )
i heard Skunk saying on some interview that some solos
on his Dan stuff were crafted and worked out , but that my old School was just a blow ….
if true that’s pretty fucking incredible
-
Fagen mentions in the book that he thinks of SD as having a rebellious Punk attitude, but he calls the music of the punk bands as "adolescent, and dumb. Really dumb."LOL! Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Reply With Quote
Roman Dodecahedron (12 sided) die discovered,...
Today, 11:16 AM in Everything Else