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Posts tagged ‘Walter Becker’

Aug 21

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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

Oct 17

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Hipster, still eminent

Of course there’s nothing really new to be heard on the pair of live albums Donald Fagen has just released, one under his own name and the other under that of Steely Dan: Northeast Corridor, a selection of the Dan’s songs recorded at the Beacon Theatre in New York and Boston’s Orpheum Theatre, and a concert version of The Nightfly, Fagen’s 1982 solo masterpiece, pieced together from those and a couple of other venues across the US. Why would there be? The original recordings were pretty close to perfect in the first place, or as close as Fagen and his late partner, Walter Becker, could make them across days, weeks and months in state-of-the-art studios.

So what’s the point? Perhaps it’s to allow us to replicate the sensation of hearing them for the first time, which is what even the slightest shift of emphasis or ornament allows. The slightly adjusted harmonies of the chorus to “Kid Charlemagne”, the melodica on “Aja”, the drum coda to “Reelin’ in the Years”, the brand-new rhapsodic trombone intro to “Things I Miss the Most”, the ceding of the solo bridge passage of “Maxine” to a member of the close-harmony backing choir — they’re small changes, but they help us to see the bigger picture anew. Otherwise the proportions and trajectories are much as they were on the originals — although in the case of The Nightfly the overall feel is a little more, shall we say, fatback: fuller and funkier, but not so much as to change the tone.

Maybe the most significant change is to Fagen’s voice, and even that doesn’t really alter the listener’s response. Always the instrument of someone who had to be persuaded to to take the lead on his own songs, and the more authentic for that, age has cost it some of its strength but none of its capacity to beguile and engage. It was always a sidelong voice, and his delivery of the confessions of a graveyard-shift DJ on The Nightfly‘s title track seems even more affecting.

When Fagen made The Nightfly, he was looking back 20 years to the time immediately before the Kennedy assassination, when capitalism seemed ready to share its material abundance throughout the western world. Now, another 40 years later, in a period of disillusion and uncertainty, the evocation of that period’s Madison Avenue-inspired optimism carries extra weight.

The musicianship across both albums is, of course, immaculate. Keith Carlock’s drums and Freddie Washington’s bass make those mid-tempo rhythms as crisp as a brand-new button-down shirt. The two-brass, two-reeds front line swivels on a dime (with a special mention for Roger Rosenberg’s baritone solo on “Black Cow”, and no blame to tenorist Walt Weiskopf for not quite being Wayne Shorter on “Aja” or Michael Brecker on “Ruby Baby”). Guitarist Jon Herington produces a great Denny Dias tribute on the euphoric “Bhodisattva” and pianist Jim Beard romps through “Glamour Profession”.

As a coda to the Steely Dan album, Fagen and his superlative quartet of backing singers leave the stage to a single-chorus instrumental arrangement of “A Man Ain’t Supposed to Cry”, a blues-ballad from a 1958 Joe Williams album. It’s a reminder of the depth of Fagen and Becker’s knowledge and love of music — as are these two albums as a whole. Which, come to think of it, is by itself a good enough reason for their existence.

* Steely Dan’s Northeast Corridor and Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly Live are out now on Universal Music. The photograph of Fagen is from the booklet with the Steely Dan album and was taken by Nick Antaya.

Sep 3

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Walter Becker 1950-2017

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen 2

Chinese music always sets me free / Angular banjos sound good to me

In a single couplet, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen made fun of themselves with wonderful grace and wicked sophistication: the qualities that imbued the music they made together. It’s so sad to think that the announcement of Becker’s death today, at the age of 67, puts an end to one of popular music’s great songwriting and record-making partnerships.

Amid the booming rock scene of the 1970s, in which anything seemed possible, Steely Dan made music that will last. That doesn’t make them unique, but it is a tribute to the enormous care and effort Becker and Fagen put into constructing the nine studio albums they made together under that name between 1972 and 2003. Their clever words, clever time-signatures and clever chords were the product of two enthusiasts dissatisfied with anything but the cleverest music they could possibly produce.

Fagen first encountered Becker at Bard College in upstate New York. He was walking past a building used for musical practice and heard someone playing a guitar in the style of Howlin’ Wolf’s records. The two bonded quickly over their shared interest in, as Fagen put it in his statement today, “jazz (from the ’20s through the mid-’60s, W.C Fields, the Marx brothers, science fiction, Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Berger, and Robert Altman films… Also soul music and Chicago blues.” All that, and much more, was in their music.

They were also unique in that, as musicians in their own band, they usually preferred to call on others to enhance their vision. Becker started as Steely Dan’s bass player, but he was also very fine rock guitarist — just listen to his lead parts on “Black Friday”, from Katy Lied, “Josie”, from Aja and “West of Hollywood” from Two Against Nature. Yet he was happy to hand that job to a succession of players with different skills and sensibilities. Some of them were Denny Dias, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Elliott Randall, Dean Parks, Hugh McCracken, Lee Ritenour, Jay Graydon and Steve Khan. The same would be true of the attitude he and Fagen shared towards the keyboard players, drummers and saxophonists they chose to articulate their vision: only the best, on their very best day, would do.

And so, very unusually in their chosen field, their wild imaginations were matched by their obsessively exigent craftsmanship. They were also some kind of weird cats. They were lucky to have their partnership, and so were we.

* The photograph of Becker (left) and Fagen is, I believe, by Anton Corbijn. I hope he doesn’t mind my use of it on this occasion. For the story of the duo in great detail, concentrating on the music, I recommend Anthony Robustelli’s Steely Dan FAQ (Backbeat Books, 2017).