By Michael Dwyer
The (Melbourne) Age
Steely Dan, Steve Winwood
Rod Laver Area
October 27, 2011
MELBOURNE — The invitation to ”sit back, relax and enjoy” isn’t in the rock’n’roll stage banter handbook. Steely Dan play soul music for the brain. Clapping along with 13 rigorously syncopated professionals is surplus to requirements. Tap your toe and miss a precision-orchestrated nuance.
Frustrated by technology and human error in the ’70s, jazz-rock perfectionists Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have reanimated in a more professionally satisfying new century. The ”greatest band [they] ever had” even smells good, Becker quipped. But age has also begun to weary them.
Fagen’s voice, having seared a blue streak through this echoing barn four years ago, lacked strength and tone this time. Though beautifully augmented by slow-grooving vocal trio the Embassy Brats, it was a slightly rasping drag on the creamy goodness of horns, keys and the dazzling guitars of Becker and John Herington.
It is perhaps a minor quibble in the face of such stunning soul and virtuosity.
Scene-stealing opener Steve Winwood returned for a chummy encore of “Pretzel Logic” but it was his catalogue we wanted more of. He was on fire on guitar and Hammond organ as his small, Latin-blooded jazz-rock band jammed through long selections from his Spencer Davis, Traffic and recent years, but not a squib from his landmark Arc of a Diver album.
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