Record Rebound: Steely Dan remaster ‘Aja’ from analogue tapes
Although they’re a divisive presence on rock music’s 20th-century blueprints, it’s impossible to deny the consummate virtuosity of Steely Dan. The New York band was formed in 1971 by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, two jazz aficionados on a quest to bring their beloved genre to the contemporary swell in rhythm and blues-based rock music. What resulted was a jazz fusion sound incorporating strains of Latin music, blues and rock.
For their first and most prolific phase between 1971 and ’81, Fagen and Becker performed and recorded with a rolling cast of highly skilled session musicians, bringing a consistent stream of compelling and innovative pop music.
The debut album, 1972’s Can’t Buy a Thrill, introduced the band on a seismic note with the timeless singles ‘Do It Again’, ‘Reelin’ In the Years’ and catchy album tracks like ‘Dirty Work’ and ‘Only a Fool Would Say That’. Steely Dan continued developing their sound through the mid-1970s, striking a zenith creatively and commercially with a distinctly refined product, Aja.
Released in September 1977, Aja was a hard-earned labour of love involving nearly 40 musicians and several months of studio time. Containing just seven tracks over a 40-minute LP, Aja was noted for its more protracted and complex arrangements that benefit from the expert production conducted by Gary Katz.
Like The Beatles, Steely Dan decided to stop touring midway through their most prominent decade. However, screaming fans weren’t the issue for Fagen and Becker; they simply saw touring as a cumbersome superfluity and a nemesis bent on limiting studio time. Instead, they preferred to focus on sleek, elaborate machines of art.
Aja, pronounced “Asia”, obliquely enough, derived its name from that of a Korean woman whom Fagen’s high-school friend’s brother married. The record is appropriately emblazoned with a sharp photograph by Hideki Fujii of the Japanese model and actress Sayoko Yamaguchi.
Taking a look inside this delectable package, we encounter a watertight selection of accessible hits; only the length of these tracks would stand to bar entry to radio waves. Perhaps the album’s most instantly alluring moments are its first two singles, ‘Peg’ and ‘Deacon Blues’.
The former is a particularly danceable groove, which was long-rumoured as referring to the tragic story of Peg Entwistle, but the band later denied the connection. “There’s no hidden meaning. We just wanted a dotted half note for that spot, and ‘Peg’ was short enough to fit with the music,” Fagen told the Wall Street Journal in 2020. Adding that it “takes place at a seedy photo shoot in L.A… from the perspective of a jilted boyfriend”.
With a similarly head-bopping rhythm, ‘Deacon Blues’ pulsates with a carefully coordinated convergence of guitars, synth and tenor saxophone, which frame a more involved theme. “The concept of the ‘expanding man’ that opens the song may have been inspired by Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man,” Fagen said, explaining the concept in Marc Myers’ Anatomy of a Song. “Walter and I were major sci-fi fans. The guy in the song imagines himself ascending to the levels of evolution, ‘expanding’ his mind, his spiritual possibilities, and his options in life.”
Elsewhere on the album, the more suppressed yet equally sexy fusion tracks like ‘Aja’, ‘Black Cow’ and ‘Home At Last’ evoke scenes of soft-top driving on coastal Californian highways, far from the wintry inauspicious climes associated with Steely Dan’s East Coast hometown. But perhaps that’s the allure of this landmark album. Conjuring lucid, idyllic scenes of escapism, Fagen and Becker shirked cumbrous concepts in favour of complex yet breezy soundscapes.
Aja is one of few albums that can boast such potent and immortal influence yet maintain its fresh and unique sound nearly five decades on. Fagen, surviving his musical partner Becker, who passed away in 2017, knows all too well that those who bought their copies in 1977 will have long since worn theirs out. Therefore, he has announced an Aja reissue to welcome fans of all generations to hear one of the finest jazz fusion works in all its original analogue glory.
The reissue has been remastered from the original analogue master tapes by Bernie Grundman and cut into high-spec 180-gram vinyl, ready for release on Friday, September 29th. The record is available now for preorder.
