A drunk text to a friend who asked me, “Back against the wall: Gaucho or Aja?”
"Having had some time to think on it and also a drink or four, I imagine steely dan would say Gaucho for exactly the reason I choose Aja.
Aja represents the high point of the band’s ability to frame what are essentially pop songs in their own special jazz-rock context.
Gaucho is an album of jazz-rock songs.
Gaucho is their technically best work by their own standard. Aja is the crowd favorite and has the least intimidating songs. Royal Scam is probably the most interesting album for guitar work. Katy Lied is unlistenable."
In a 1974 interview, here’s Fagen, on why they included Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” on a Pretzel Logic:
"“Walter and I are both jazz fans, and as a composition this one stood up so well, we wanted to hear it with all the expertise of modern hi-fi. Most of the great jazz compositions have been neglected. There is no jazz in America now. there is a considerable amount of electric experimenting, but that doesn’t interest me and their improvisation is strictly modal - and boring. John Coltrane was a fantastic player, but he was responsible for leading people into making a terrible mistake. I like more changes in music and, anyway, I preferred John before his modal period, when he was with the Miles Davis Quintet.”
-p.39, Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion, ed. by Barney Hoskyns.
For those not all geeked-out on music theory, you know how even your mom likes Miles’s Kind of Blue record? Coltrane’s on that (with Cannonball Adderley on the other sax) and it’s all modal, in that you pick a key and a scale and kind of groove on just the chords there; not a lot of chromaticism, much less key changes and “weird” chord changes.
Fagen is talking more about bop and Ellington, where there’s a different chord every beat, and the chords can be big ol’ hairy ones F#minor7b5add9. Modal music has a structure that’s more like album-rock from 1965 to 1990 or so. So Fagen and Becker were writing pop tunes as if they were old timey jazzbos, and for a rock player, they just kick your ass, 'cuz you’ve never seen this stuff before.
BTW: I have changed the mood in a bar radically, many times, by going to the juke and finding Steely Dan’s Greatest Hits and choosing “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.” You just don’t hear that in bars that mostly have “classic rock”/country and Stevie Ray Vaughan on the juke.
