What do you do when a rock band you love with all your heart, because its songs are smarter than those by any other band in the universe, suddenly abandons rock for smoother than silk lounge jazz? With all the cool rough edges sanded off, leaving only the clever lyrics and lots of superslick playing by superslick smooth jazz studio hacks? This is the question that confronted me in 1977, when Steely Dan released Aja. And I’ll tell you what I did. I wrote them off as a bad bet, just another LA band that disappeared into pseudo-jazz hell, never to reemerge.
Cynical and sneering, but with a soft side, Steely Dan had always employed the best studio musicians to produce its carefully crafted tunes. But they were ROCK tunes, and cool even when they were hot. “Kid Charlemagne,” “My Old School,” “Dr. Wu,” “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” “Any Major Dude Will Tell You,” “Reelin’ in the Years”—they put out song after great song, and were by anybody’s measure one of the best and most consistent bands of the seventies.
I don’t care that Aja got great reviews when it was released; I like rock and I like hard jazz, but if there’s one thing I can’t stomach is a lukewarm hybrid of the sort you’d expect from a recording session that included the likes of the Tom Scott contingent of LA’s jazz lite community. With Larry Carlton on guitar and Michael McDonald on backing vocals, to name just a few of the dozens of studio pros, Aja sacrificed the band’s former rock orientation for a sound as polished and edgeless as a brass egg.
All that said, I have discovered, not having listened to it for some twenty years, that it has its pleasures. It may not rock, but most of its songs are pleasantly lulling, like a good Valium high, although the LP’s 8-minute title track Aja isn’t amongst them. Sung in a stilted hush, and filled with clichéd-Asian riffs, it goes on too long and it offers too little. It’s jazz fusion of the most irksome sort; even the guitar solo fails to impress. Everything is too tidy; it’s like a man who has perfected his comb-over. Compared to “Aja,” “Black Cow” is a funky marvel, which it isn’t, really. Less a salute to the mixed drink than to a loser who favors them, the song features a nice horn section and some excellent female backing vocals. But it’s every bit as smooth as the kahlua in the Black Cow, and features an almost perfectly dull electric piano solo by Joe Sample and a rather faceless tenor sax solo by Wayne Shorter, who’s capable of far better. In short, I’ll take it over “Aja,” and I won’t turn it off it comes on the radio, but compared to previous Steely Dan product it’s both too slick and too bland.
“Deacon Blues” I like, mainly because of the lyrics. It has a bit more propulsion than the album’s first two cuts, but it’s still a carefully performed piece of smooth jazz craft. Horns galore, some static drums, and more female backing vocals make it more laid back even than any Eric Clapton blues I’ve ever heard, and not even bebop saxophonist Pete Christlieb can pull it out of its rut. Which leaves the lyrics, in which Donald Fagen plays the loser: “I’ll learn to work the saxophone/I’ll play just what I feel/Drink Scotch whisky all night long/And die behind the wheel/They got a name for the winners in the world/I want a name when I lose/They call Alabama the Crimson Tide/Call me Deacon Blues.” As for “Peg,” at least it has spunk. I’d love to hear the earlier Steely Dan perform this one, but ain’t gonna happen. That said it contains the one real moment of excitement on the LP, in the form of a guitar solo by Jay Graydon, and it moves faster than an Amish buggy, which is more than can be said about most of the songs on the LP. That said, the lyrics lack that good old cynical Steely Dan punch, which is too bad.
“Home at Last” is a nondescript nonentity of a no-account song by the fellows who gave us “Show Biz Kids.” But I’m being too harsh. On this one the band shows some gumption. Some jazzy piano, more horns—but just when you think the song has been buffed to death, Walter Becker plays a guitar solo that shows real spirit. As for “I Got the News” Becker comes through on guitar again, which is good, because the song’s funk lite is not improved by the discernible backing vocals of the anti-Christ Michael McDonald. Some tasteful jazz piano and a big rhythm section help, and it’s nice to hear at least one song where the horns don’t dominate. Unfortunately the lyrics aren’t particularly sharp-edged, and I can’t help but wonder where the duo left their poison pen before the sessions.
“Josie” opens like a rocker, and even kind of acts like a rocker, and is the closest thing to an old school Steely Dan tune on Aja. It has momentum, even if the guitar riff that propels it is too smooth by miles, but once again Becker tosses off an actual guitar solo, and the lyrics (“When Josie comes home, so good/She’s the pride of the neighborhood/She’s the raw flame, the live wire/She prays like a Roman/With her eyes on fire”) are bona fide great.
Steely Dan always had jazzish inclinations—check out “Only a Fool Would Say That” off their first LP, 1972’s Can’t Buy a Thrill—but why they threw in the towel and went over to the dark side of jazz fusion on Aja remains a mystery. One thing is for sure; by 1980’s Gaucho their soft jazz pretensions had ceased to captivate and begun to bore. Critics began to wake up; Dave Marsh called it “the kind of music that passes for jazz in Holiday Inn lounges,” and I dare anyone to tell me to my face that the title cut is anything but overwrought studio brouhaha produced by fusion obsessives with too much time and money on their hands. Why most critics, and the record-buying public, didn’t detect the same impulses in Aja is beyond me. Call me a prophet, because I saw exactly where they were going. Into the bottomless pit of Gaucho’s title track, while the people who loved them for “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” rent their garments and gnashed their teeth.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B-
