Originally published on Sept. 21, 2011
By Jon Pareles
New York Times
Steely Dan rested suavely on its laurels at the Beacon Theater on Tuesday night. The concert was part of a seven-night stand featuring live versions of full albums, among them The Royal Scam, from 1976, performed on Tuesday and also slated for the last Beacon show on Friday.
Steely Dan’s irony-loving songwriters, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, once detested touring and preferred to hole up in the studio, perfecting songs. Now, in a reversal they no doubt sardonically savor, Steely Dan has not released a new album since Everything Must Go in 2003 and frequently tours worldwide.
Steely Dan’s identity has also changed, from the subversive pop act it was in the 1970s — making cryptic, complex songs into radio hits — to a latter-day jazz big band tweaking a cherished repertory. The opening act was the brisk, agile jazz trio led by Sam Yahel on Hammond organ (and almost drowned in conversation), and Steely Dan’s band warmed up with a hard-bop tune, “Dizzy’s Bidness.” The front of Mr. Fagen’s keyboard showed images of a jazz pantheon.
The Royal Scam is a candidate for Steely Dan’s most tense, gnarled album, start to finish. The characters in its songs are desperate — a hippie drug chemist turned fugitive in “Kid Charlemagne,” a sociopath holed up against police in “Don’t Take Me Alive” — or disillusioned. The melodies to songs like “The Caves of Altamira” and “Green Earrings” are chromatic and jumpy — so tricky that onstage Mr. Fagen sometimes strained to maneuver through them. The chord progressions dodge and weave, briefly sounding like bluesy rock or funk, only to mutate toward modern jazz; horn arrangements loom on the horizons.
Steely Dan performed the album relatively faithfully, though with extended solos. Sometimes the lead guitarist, Jon Herington, had leeway to apply his own supple, speedy approach; sometimes, as in “Don’t Take Me Alive,” he emulated the studio guitar leads, signaling that Steely Dan considered them structural.
Two songs got thorough makeovers: “The Fez,” sung in Spanish by the female backup singers, as horns took over the old keyboard line, and “Everything You Did,” given a more relaxed beat. The songs had their familiar barbs and convolutions, with jazzy embellishments, like Jim Pugh’s running trombone commentary in “The Royal Scam.” Playing through the album, however, was the obligatory part of the two-and-a-half-hour set; things loosened up afterward.
There were cackling monologues from Mr. Becker, who dismissed current pop as “part of a fashion trend”; he also took on more guitar solos with a spiky, bluesy directness. Chris Potter, the saxophonist in Mr. Yahel’s trio, joined the band for the title song of Steely Dan’s 2000 album, Two Against Nature, adding one more assertive strand of counterpoint to the jagged push-and-pull of its 6/4 groove.
“Show Biz Kids” turned into hypnotic one-chord funk; the altered blues of “Bodhisattva” tilted toward western swing with Mr. Herington’s guitar solo, while “My Old School” went honky-tonk with Jim Beard’s piano. It was Steely Dan freed from studio permanence, reveling in the road.
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