Major dudes, minor ninths

The implied flavour of much of the music made by Donald Fagen and the late Walter Becker might be read as that of hard bop as played on the West Coast: laconic, brainy, slyly coded, but also somehow sunlit. By contrast with the jazz musicians they admired, the Steely Dan duo were afforded the sort of time and effort needed to make their records as immaculate as possible, successfully substituting wit and taste for spontaneity. The result, almost airtight in its perfection, would seem to render any attempt at recreation by third parties not just superfluous but doomed from the outset.

There are, nevertheless, several Steely Dan tribute outfits of high repute, existing to satisfy the appetite in particular of those never fortunate enough to hear the original band in person. I haven’t seen any of them, although I was sorry to miss the 14-piece Royal Scammers when they played the 606 Club in Chelsea last year, having heard good reports from reliable sources.

But if tribute bands live are one thing, offering at least a partial guarantee of satisfaction, an album of reinterpretations is a great deal riskier. The British singer and pianist Chris Ingham brings it off with Walter / Donald, his rearrangements of 13 songs performed by a quintet in which he’s joined by the trumpeter Paul Higgs, the saxophonist Harry Greene, the double bassist Geoff Gascoyne and the drummer George Double.

Ingham is a former music journalist (for Mojo, mostly) and author of books on the Beatles, Billie Holiday and others. Now he writes TV soundtracks and leads a band that has also recorded and toured its surveys the music of Hoagy Carmichael, Dudley Moore and Stan Getz. A fine pianist, he has a light, pleasant singing voice, totally lacking in affectation but not in character, wisely avoiding attempts to imitate Fagen’s distinctive sardonic croon. It’s a little like listening to Georgie Fame singing Mose Allison’s songs: a intelligent take, full of the sort of implicit affection and respect which, along with the musicianship involved, make it stand up as a valid adjunct to the originals.

There are some fine moments, many of which bring the latent jazz to the surface. “Your Gold Teeth II” has a lovely two-horn unison intro, a little like a gentler Horace Silver arrangement, and “I Got the News” finds a hint of Monk in the melody’s staccato phrases. The choice of material also veers into less obvious areas, as with “The Last Mall”, a warped blues-with-a-bridge from Everything Must Go, the last Dan album, released in 2003, which has its chords straightened out and is enlivened by the smart addition of the irresistible horn riff from Fagen’s cover of “Ruby Baby”, from The Nightfly. And I think I might even prefer Ingham’s reading of the quietly heartbreaking “Paging Audrey” to that on Becker’s second solo album, Circus Money (2008).

There are fine horn solos throughout, Higgs displaying an almost cornet-like brightness and an adroit use of cup or plunger mute on the brief coda to “Your Gold Teeth II” and the intro and solos on “Haitian Divorce”, while Greene’s tenor has a fluent mobility reminiscent (to me, anyway) of Hank Mobley, excelling on “What a Shame About Me”, a really great song — a John Cheever short story in five verses.

Honestly, if you walked into a club and found yourself listening to this band playing this material, you’d be extremely happy. It might not be a revelation but you’d be hearing wonderful songs carefully turned so as to catch the light from a different angle, in the process drawing out their humanity.

* The Chris Ingham Quintet plays a launch gig for Walter / Donald at the Pizza Express in Soho on September 17. The album is out now on Downhome Records, available from https://www.chrisingham.co.uk/shop