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 […]
Tag Archives | Recordings
‘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 […]
Donald Fagen: Morph the Cat
By Woodrow WilkinsAllAboutJazz.com There’s an engaging quality to Donald Fagen’s songwriting and perfectionism that makes Steely Dan fans flock to his solo albums. While The Nightfly (1982) and Kamakiriad (1993) were expressly Fagen, Morph the Cat closely resembles Steely Dan without Walter Becker. The lineup partially reflects the ensemble that recorded the Dan’s 2003 release, Everything Must Go, and toured with the […]
Who Is Morph the Cat?
By Fred Kaplan Slate It doesn’t happen often, but whenever Steely Dan — or one of its leaders, Donald Fagen or Walter Becker — comes out with a new album, the band’s more obsessive fans pore over the lyric sheets like a squad of Yalie lit crits, scrambling to decipher the cryptic allusions. They’re the most […]
Donald Fagen – Morph the Cat
By John Henry Audiophile Audition Now here’s an artist who hasn’t given up on DVD-Audio, and including with it not only both Dolby Digital and DTS options, but also a separate CD – the best all-around approach to “DualDisc” as far as we’re concerned. If the CD changer in my car weren’t on the fritz […]
Fagen Delivers NY in ‘Morph the Cat’
By Jeffrey Lee Puckett Louisville Courier-Journal Donald Fagen’s Morph the Cat is a series of fanciful Manhattan snapshots primarily connected by Fagen’s dry wit, uptown rhythm & blues and a curious fascination with death. It isn’t a narrative, by any means, but more like an envelope of photos found on a sidewalk, as evocative as they […]
This isn’t Steely Dan, and There Ain’t No ‘Fagen’ It
By Devin Grant Charleston Post and Courier Morph The Cat Donald Fagen Reprise On the rare occasion that Donald Fagen decides to bless the music world with a solo release, it is cause for celebration among fans of his (also occasional) outfit, Steely Dan. You see, Fagen’s solo outings might as well be Steely Dan […]
Review: ‘Morph the Cat’
By Melissa Ruggieri Times-Dispatch Staff Writer RICHMOND, Va. — At his best, Donald Fagen is a peculiar curmudgeon, a sort of mad scientist mixing up elements of jazz, funk and pop and somehow making them stick. That Fagen, the one so prominent on his first two solo albums, 1982’s The Nightfly and 1993’s Kamakiriad, is the kind […]
Steely Dan: Our 15 Favorite Songs
Originally published on March 18, 2006 By Chris Willman Entertainment Weekly Steely Dan is one of the greatest bands in rock history… and one of the least influential, judging from the complete lack of literarily inclined, wildly sardonic jazz-bo masterminds that have followed. But it’s not such a terrible tragedy that they remain a genre unto […]
Catdown to Ecstasy
Steely Dan’s unfashionable co-founder catches a New York where things changed forever By James Hunter Village Voice Morph the Cat Reprise Donald Fagen’s new album, the Steely Dan co-founder’s first since 1993’s Kamakiriad, is a funky suite devoted to post–9-11 conundrums. His song cycle is framed by “Morph the Cat,” a lazy-gaited pop-jazz groove that […]
