World Jazz Band

Steely Dan is an American jazz-classic rock band centered on core members Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. The band reached a peak of popularity in the late 1970s, with the release of seven albums blending elements of jazz, rock, funk, R&B, and pop. Rolling Stone magazine has called them “the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies.”

The band’s music is characterized by complex jazz-influenced structures and harmonies played by Becker and Fagen along with a revolving cast of rock and pop studio musicians. Steely Dan’s “cerebral,” “wry” and “eccentric” lyrics are filled with sharp sarcasm which often touches upon such “dark” themes as drugs, crime, and their true-to-life “contempt of west coast hippies.” The pair are well-known for their near-obsessive perfectionism in the recording studio, with one notable example being that Becker and Fagen used at least 42 different studio musicians, 11 engineers, and took over a year to record the tracks that resulted in 1980′s Gaucho — an album that contains only seven songs.

Steely Dan toured from 1972 to 1974, but in 1975 became a purely studio-based act. The late 1970s saw the group release a series of extremely successful singles and albums. They disbanded in 1981, and throughout most of the next decade, the duo remained largely inactive in the music world. During this time, the group steadily built and maintained “a cult following.” In 1993, the group resumed playing live concerts; the early 21st century saw Steely Dan release two albums of new material, the first of which earned a Grammy Award for Album of the Year. They have sold more than 30 million albums worldwide.

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Steely Dan – Disc of the day – Mojo
Mojo – The Music Magazine. "Thus treads heavily the titanic STEELY DAN, casting a long shadow upon the contemporary rock wasteland," wrote a pseudonymous Donald Fagen on this LP's sleevenotes, "aspiring to spill its seed on barren ground." Now there's ambition. Luckily there was a little more to Can't Buy A Thrill than simply scoring some yucks against the Church Fathers. The first official album by Fagen and partner Walter Becker, New Yorkers in Los Angeles, …
Pauls World of Funky Stuff: Steely Dan- Making of Peg
Many of these chords have been used in mainstream music and I find the music of Steely Dan rich with them. For those of you who speak music, here's the opening sequence to Peg, the song featured in the "Classic Album" segment in the …
Radio Dupree: Steely Dan live 2009: Montreux Jazz Festival
Jun 25 – Amsterdam, Holland – Heineken Music Hall Jun 26 – Brussels, Belgium – Forest National Jun 28 – Edinburgh, Scotland – Edinburgh Playhouse Jun 29 – Birmingham, UK – NIA Jul 01 – London, UK – Hammersmith Apollo …

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