While traveling to Asia I had the pleasure of listening to the following complete work of their album Steely Dan for the first time.
It was many years ago, but long after Shanghai was a small fishing village. But thanks to its location by the southern section of the Yangtze River, it has since grown to be the biggest city in China, and one of the largest in the entire world.
It is also home to the Nanjing Road shopping district, a mix of modern malls and traditional Chinese stores and food outlets. Its 5.5km streets rank alongside Oxford Street in London and the Champs-Élysées in Paris as one of the busiest commercial areas in the world, with one million people shopping there every day.
Back to AJA - Everything I needed to know about these guys can be found within the grooves of Aja. It’s an amazing crafted jazz recording that appeals to jazz, and rock fanatics alike. Tracks like ‘Peg’ and ‘Josie’ could still rub elbows with the complex soloing of ‘Aja’ and the dense dreaminess of ‘Deacon Blues’. Somehow, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen found a way to have their cake, eat it and share it too by these two talented musicians.
Since then Aja hasn’t lost any of its charm and subversion in the four decades since its initial release. It’s still a perfectly rendered, beautifully produced, fully fleshed-out masterpiece that propelled Walter Beker and Donal Fagen to the forefront as music’s madcap geniuses. It never really got any better than Aja, but it never needed to. Aja s the kind of album that any musician would love to hang their legacy on.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfGibfZATlGogmBx443IFoYCguGNu6vtp
Steely Dan is an American rock band founded in 1971 in New York by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Initially the band had a stable lineup, but in 1974 Becker and Fagen retired from live performances to become a studio-only band, opting to record with a revolving cast of session musicians.
Although not included in this album, it’s the track the most enjoyed recording. Listen to the original and their version.