Our final Fagen song this week is from his astonishing solo album Kamakiriad. It’s a concept album: a long, shaggy, sci-fi romp in a futuristic car. The songs have a loose, funky, jiggly joy that make this album perfect on a long car trip, or when you’re cleaning the house. I love it with an unseemly […]
Read MoreThis wasn’t the first cut on the Gaucho album to speak to me; it took me a while to warm up to it. It is, in fact, not exactly a warm song. But suddenly I couldn’t get enough of it. It’s understated, boppy, and subtle as hell. The lyrics, like so many of Fagen’s, sit like veritable […]
Read MoreFrom the opening upbeat, we know we’re in a warm bath. That beautiful saxophone, that long-limbed tempo, the sweet unabashed major chords – pure sunlight. When I first heard it, I was driving at night through the oil fields of western Oklahoma, picking up some faraway station in that random way that happens at night. […]
Read MoreI couldn’t resist including this truly odd song from Pretzel Logic. It’s very short. One of the reasons it’s so short is that each of the three verses is one line long. Why did Fagen do that?! It makes me laugh every time – as if he were really so very irritated with his friend Buzz that […]
Read MoreSteely Dan. The sound track of my 20’s. What a band. It’s really all about guitarist Walter Becker and keyboard/vocalist Donald Fagen. But if you push me against the wall, not terribly hard, I’ll say it’s really all about Donald Fagen. What a composer, what a lyricist. He was actually writing art songs all along: […]
Read MoreWhen Native Dancer was first released in 1974, it was marketed as a Wayne Shorter album. That made a certain undeniable sense: an alumnus of one of Miles Davis’s greatest groups (it also included Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams and Ron Carter), Shorter was by then part of the wildly popular jazz fusion band Weather Report. Native Dancer was sold […]
Read MoreIf you read my final New York Times op-ed column on Tuesday, you know that it drives me batty that American’s greatest opera company won’t perform America’s greatest opera. It has been nearly a quarter of a century since the Metropolitan Opera last put on a production of Porgy and Bess. Am I the only one who finds […]
Read MoreIt is not exactly news that Adam Guettel is a composer of immense talent. The grandson of Richard Rodgers (one is required to note that when writing about Guettel), he has a transcendent melodic gift, and has written more than his fair share of gorgeous theater songs. Alas, Guettel, at 50, has had only three […]
Read MoreOn March 7, 1965, Louis Armstrong was in Denmark, where he watched in horror the televised images of civil rights marchers in Selma being brutally attacked by police. When Danish reporters asked Armstrong for his reaction, he said angrily that he had become “physically ill” watching the beatings, and added, “They would beat Jesus if […]
Read MoreI fell in love with Joyce Moreno—musically, that is—two years ago when I stumbled into Birdland one evening in search of a Brazilian music fix. The well-known composer-singer Dori Caymmi (“Obsession; “The Look of Love”) was playing that night, and his group included a special guest from Rio de Janiero, a woman known only as […]
Read More