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 — […]
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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 You know: collectors of pre-war blues 78s, memorizers of outdated jazz argot.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 […]
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 […]
Steely Dan at Hammersmith Apollo, London
By John L Walters guardian.co.uk “Hiya kids,” says Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, “we’re going to play songs from the recent past, and going back to the deep 70s… if you know what I mean.” Everyone knows what he means, as the 12-strong band hammer out the golden repertoire: Time Out of Mind, Hey Nineteen, Bad […]
Steely Dan Reels in the Glory Years
By Paul Kosidowski Milwaukee Journal Sentinel The 21st century still holds the Me Decade in ironic reverence, as any Abba or AMC Gremlin enthusiast can testify. But Steely Dan, the precision-engineered and subversive pop phenomenon of the 1970s, isn’t a likely candidate for nostalgia. Still, its Marcus Amphitheater concert Thursday night was the perfect start […]
Steely Dan Plays It Smooth At Freedom Hill
By Gary Graff The Oakland Press STERLING HEIGHTS, Mich. — For a band that defiantly didn’t tour for so many years, Steely Dan has become a pretty smooth live act. Of course, Walter Becker, Donald Fagen and company have had some practice at this point, having resumed Steely Dan as a performing entity in 1993 […]
