Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen looks back to shared roots and finds jazz, R&B, and something even deeper By Bernard Perusse The Montreal Gazette MONTREAL — It’s been said that although Steely Dan are in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, the duo — singer and keyboard player Donald Fagen and guitarist Walter Becker — […]
Steely Dan jazzes up a summer night
By David KieleyBoston Globe Originally published on June 24, 2008 Pity the usher, tiny flashlight in hand, trying to keep a throng of Boston couples from dancing in the aisles during a Steely Dan show. Bandleaders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker brought their legendary jazz-rock outfit to the Bank of America Pavilion on Monday night […]
Walter Becker ‘Circus Money’
By Dan LeRoy Hartford Courant It will be easier for most to talk about what Walter Becker’s second album (his first in 14 years) is not — an effort that sounds like another outing from best-known and -loved sophisticates, Steely Dan — than what it actually is. It’s as modest as Becker’s admittedly limited vocals, […]
Pop Veterans Still Pumping Anti-Charisma
By Ben Ratliff New York Times Donald Fagen and Walter Becker seem like the kind of late-1960s hypercerebral born-cynical East Coast hipsters who are often found valorizing authenticity in aesthetic expression. You know: collectors of pre-war blues 78s, memorizers of outdated jazz argot. But instead of turning away from pop gloss, they acted like good […]
Donald Fagen interview
By John Del SignoreGothamist.com Originally published on June 13, 2008 Since he began his fruitful collaboration with Walter Becker back at Bard College in 1968, Grammy award-winning musician Donald Fagen has steadily distinguished himself as one of the smartest and most imaginative contemporary songwriters. As Steely Dan, the innovative duo lays claim to an impressive catalog of hit singles that […]
Becker’s ‘Money’: Steely Dan Roots Show on Solo Album
By Richard Cromelin Los Angeles Times Walter Becker Circus Money Mailboat *** “Then you find you’re back in Vegas with a handle in your hand” goes a memorable line from Steely Dan’s debut hit, “Do It Again.” Thirty-six years later, Steely Dan co-auteur Walter Becker is still positioning characters in front of the slot machines. […]
The Nightfly Revisited
By Ted Giola Jazz.com When jazz fans look back at the fusion music of the late 1960s and 1970s, they tend to see only half of the picture. They remember the jazz musicians who crossed over to the rock and pop charts, but they forget the other side of the equation — the rock and […]
Everything Must Groove
By Ken Micallef EMusician.com Interviewing Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen is a lot like playing a verbal pinball machine: their answers change direction with a comic, if disorienting, suddenness — deflecting the thrust of a question and bouncing up against an array of societal, historical, and musical references. For instance, when I asked […]
‘The Nightfly’ Still Lives at 25
By Robert J. Toth The Wall Street Journal One of pop music’s sneakiest masterpieces has turned 25. Often, an album rises from regular best-seller to classic status because it captures the temper of its times. “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” for instance, simply sounds like 1967, trippy and disarrayed. But “The Nightfly,” the 1982 […]
Just A Minute With: Donald Fagen
By Mark McSherry Reuters NEW YORK – American musician Donald Fagen — half of jazz-rock duo Steely Dan alongside Walter Becker — is in no rush to put out a fourth solo album, having taken 25 years to produce the first three. Outside of Steely Dan, Fagen’s three albums — “The Nightfly,” “Kamakiriad,” and “Morph […]
