The director Donald Fagen loathes: “He must be really dumb”
It’s impossible to describe what Steely Dan does in just one genre. For all of the great music that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker have made under the rock and roll banner, they were more interested in toying with any sound that came into their head rather than competing with the stadium rock bands they were competing with. While Fagen may have loved all kinds of music, one of his main inspirations always came back to the world of jazz.
From the release of their first record, Can’t Buy a Thrill, many of the band’s greatest songs benefited from having some sort of jazz harmony within it, from the smooth flair of ‘Do It Again’ to the shuffling rhythms of ‘Reelin In the Years’. While ‘The Dan’ may have been quoting what they felt at the time, this kind of improvisation in the studio dated back to years before they had even begun.
Before the group had begun, artists like Miles Davis were already breaking down boundaries for what the genre could be, taking modern jazz into different areas on albums like Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew. With a broad range of musical modes to explore, Steely Dan became more of an aesthetic when the band ventured into the studio, by which time Fagen and Becker had become studio lab rats guiding their session musicians through every single song.
Even though jazz may have felt most at home on the stage and record, it didn’t take long before the genre reached the big screen. Outside of its inclusion in the background of classic cinema, Damien Chazelle was responsible for making some of the most high-profile movies of his career centred around jazz.
Throughout both Whiplash and La La Land, Chazelle shows the harsher side of the genre, whether it’s JK Simmons’s Terrence Flecher’s cutthroat approach to conducting or Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian talking about the virtues of jazz. Although many jazz musicians may have been proud to see their genre on the big screen, Fagen was less than impressed when he saw them for the first time.
When talking about Chazelle’s work later on, Fagen thought that he fundamentally misunderstood what the genre was supposed to be. Instead of artists having fun pushing themselves and paying tribute to the massive trailblazers that came before, Fagen thought that Chazelle’s take on the genre was the most shallow perspective anyone could have put on film.
Discussing his issues with the movies, Fagen was disheartened seeing the genre treated like a musical costume, telling The Third Story, “There’s this other guy that makes movies. He made that movie about the horrible drum teacher. Fuck that motherfucker. And then La La Land, where it looks like white people invented jazz or whatever. He doesn’t even know what it is, and yet he’s making movies about it. It’s disgusting. He must be really dumb”.
While Fagen and Becker had their fair share of times being hard on the session musicians who came in to play on their records, they never forgot why they were making music in the first place. As competitive as Chazelle may have made the music industry look on film, Steely Dan made their music for the pure love of hearing what they heard in their head onto vinyl.
