3/3/2008
Jazz.com - The Nightfly Revisited 

Jazz.Com

February 17, 2008
The Nightfly Revisited
Ted Giola

When jazz fans look back at the fusion music of the late 1960s and 1970s, they tend to see only half of the picture. They remember the jazz musicians who crossed over to the rock and pop charts, but they forget the other side of the equation -- the rock and pop acts who embraced the jazz idiom.

Yet for every Miles Davis, there was a Frank Zappa. For every Weather Report, there was a Blood, Sweat and Tears. For every Grover Washington, there was a Joni Mitchell. And though it is easy to dismiss the long-haired hippie types who dared mess with jazz, the fact is that the rockers had at least one big advantage.

Perhaps it was only a psychological advantage, but (as Yogi Berra once said) the mental half is ninety percent of the game. When rock or pop musicians tackled jazz, they usually believed they were raising the level of their music. Embracing jazz was their way of aspiring to a higher degree of artistry.

The jazz musicians who took on rock-and-roll rarely had such high and mighty notions. True, there were a few jazz cats who moved into fusion for aesthetic reasons, but the vast majority did it for baser motives - a chance at a bigger payday or a larger dose of fame.

When Sonny Rollins recorded "Disco Monk," he certainly had some goals in mind, but I doubt that one of them was a plan to raise his music to a grander level of expression. When Count Basie started covering songs by the Beatles, he may have had his reasons, but who dares claim that he had decided that the Liverpool sound was cooler than Kansas City swing?

The rock and pop acts who embraced jazz, in contrast, often did so despite commercial considerations. When Joni Mitchell released her Mingus LP, it proved to be her poorest selling release in a decade. To some extent, Joni never regained the mass market audience she had enjoyed before this move. Zappa had his best sales when he squeezed the jazz out of his recordings, and opted instead for "Valley Girl" shtick. The band Chicago sold more records, the less jazz they put into them. In short, when the rock-and-pop folks added jazz to the mix, it invariably hurt their marketability and compromised their prospects. For this reason, I like to champion the rock side of jazz-rock fusion, give a nod to the commercial artists who elevated their music during this turbulent period despite the costs.

No band epitomized turbo-charged pop-jazz better than Steely Dan. The group was formed around the nucleus of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, who met at Bard College in 1967. They played together in various groups (one of which, The Bad Rock Group, featured future comedian Chevy Chase on drums). But the success of their LP, Can't Buy a Thrill brought the duo fame as Steely Dan, and during the 1970s they released a series of albums marked by smart song-writing, lots of attitude, and impeccable musicianship. Becker and Fagen brought in the best studio musicians for their projects - so much so, that being asked to participate on a Steely Dan LP became a sign that a studio player had reached the top rung of the ladder. The material was perfectly suited for displaying jazz chops. These songs had some bite, helped along by juicy chord changes and clever arrangements.

But this music also succeeded because of the sly lyrics. The words to these songs were sassy and in-your-face, sometimes a little ambiguous. (What was that number that Rikki was supposed to send off in a letter to himself? Or is it herself? Is it a number between one and ten? Nowadays could you send it off in an email to yourself?) I especially liked the way the lyrics combined macho bravado with raw vulnerability. This was a paradoxical mixture, but Becker and Fagen pulled it off. Even a single couplet could play on both tough and soft angles - for example, on "Deacon Blues," where Fagen sings: "I cried when I wrote this song / Sue me if I play too long." Hearing that made me wish I could write a line that combined "I cried" and "sue me" in a single burst of poetry.

The breakup of Steely Dan in 1981 signaled the end of an era. The great age of fusion was over, for all intents and purposes. The formula had become formulaic. Yet Donald Fagen followed up with a solo project the following year, The Nightfly, which showed that the idea of mixing pop and jazz still could produce one final masterpiece.

And The Nightfly is definitely a masterpiece. Everything about this project clicks. The musicianship is outstanding throughout. (Of course, when you can bring in the Breckers, Larry Carlton, Jeff Porcaro, and other top drawer talent, you can rest assured that the beat will be happening even if the tune is "Mairzy Doats.") But these songs are also a cut above, displaying some of Fagen's deepest lyrics, along with the great chord changes and infectious grooves that distinguished his Steely Dan efforts.

Even Fagen's singing, which is not his strong suit, works wonderfully here, and when he overdubs his own voice on "Maxine," he charms me both with the vocal arrangement, and even more with a rare moment during which the he lets down his guard. Instead of the tough boy after school attitude, so characteristic of Steely Dan, he gives us a glimpse of sweet high school love, all the sweeter for its confusion of reality and dreamy hopes. This is one of the most endearing pop-fusion ballads, and pulls at the heartstrings because (for once) the listener knows more than the narrator of the song, knows that these early spring loves rarely survive the winter.

And then there is the peculiar, yet strangely affecting theme that pervades the project. For The Nightfly is a theme album, even if it is hard to articulate the thematic content with precision. Let's say that Fagen tried to combine a nostalgic look at the past with an optimistic look at the future. Or, to be more precise, Fagen fixates on the shallow concepts of the future that were the common currency in the 1950s and 1960s. How else could you justify a song about the "I.G.Y."? (I.G.Y. stands for the International Geophysical Year, which was 1957-58. And if you want to learn more about it, don't ask me; email a geophysicist or visit Wikipedia.) Who else would write a song about the New Frontier?

These songs are full of odd references to what naive youngsters in the Eisenhower - Kennedy years would expect from the future. Fagen sings about wearing spandex jackets, listening to Brubeck, and traveling undersea by rail. Everything is "graphite and glitter." And even when he tackles a darker topic, as when he hints at an island revolution on "The Goodbye Look," in a setting that just might be Havana, the mood is airy and light. This is more "Don't Worry, Be Happy" than the Godfather II.

I think that this strange angle on the 1950s and early 1960s is one of the reasons for this album's lasting appeal. After the Kennedy assassination, America lost its innocence. We became a cynical nation. My friend Ken Engelhart will even tell you that the violence in American motion pictures starting in the late 1960s comes mostly out of the sublminal impact of the Zapruder film. And he may be right. This is the ominous clock that Fagen tries to roll back, and this is his genius. While other works try to evoke the old days by focusing on sock hops and malt shop - think Happy Days or Grease -- Fagen understands that these were the most superficial aspects of the era. What we lost after the Zapruder moment was not our past. It was our future. The Nightfly recaptures that very element, in all its elusiveness. These are songs about the future we lost back in the past, and in that convoluted way resonate with tragedy behind their happy, optimistic facade.

An album as perfect as The Nightfly seemed to promise a great solo career for Fagen, and his fans eagerly waited for the follow-up recording. And they waited . . . . and waited. Finally Kamakiriad came out in 1993. Under different circumstances, this project might have made a bigger impact, but after eleven years, even a strong offering from Fagen was bound to seem anti-climactic. And the theme of Kamakiriad, which is still future oriented, but now in a more cartoonish sci-fi manner, didn't help. Even the MTV video for the release seemed to take delight in cheesy animation effects. But thought the CD lacked have the resonance of The Nightfly, the songs were still well-crafted and impeccably played. Fagen fell short only because he had led us to expect so much.

With the release of Morph the Cat in 2006, Fagen completed what now proved to be a trilogy of solo CDs. Certainly Fagen knows how to put closure on a project. With its themes of old age and death, this final release moved a world away from the New Frontier attitudes of The Nightfly. This is a daring move for a pop musician, but Fagen has never been one to play it safe. And though the angle may jar some listeners, it is an honest one. Above all, the grooves are still happening. Tracks like "H Gang," "Security Joan" and "The Great Pagoda of Funn" show that fusion can still blow a fuse or two. These performances also make clear the stylistic unity linking Fagen's work from the early 1970s to the present day

2/17/2008
Donald Fagen Sirius show repeat by popular demand! 
By popular demand, the Donald Fagen Sirius Guest DJ show on the Savannah Daydreamin' Radio Hour will be repeated - Sunday February 17 at 10:00pm ET, 7 Pacific.

2/1/2008
Donald Fagen Interviews on Sirius! 
Check out Donanld on these Sirius Satellite Radio programs!

Date: Thursday, February 7
Channel: '70's
Event: Magic Matt 'Celebrity Thursday' with Donald Fagen!
Time: 7:00am EST

With or without Steely Dan, Donald Fagen is a one man titan in the music world. Rarely granting radio interviews, lead singer-songwriter Fagen obliges Matt for a sit down to celebrate the release of his 'Nightfly Trilogy' set of solo works. But has Magic Matt got his hands full with a beautiful mind here, or is Fagen just having fun? Tune in and decide on Celebrity Thursday!


Date: Wednesday, February 13
Channel: Margaritaville
Event: Guest DJ
Time: 12:00 midnight EST.


Date: Saturday, February 16
Channel: Pure Jazz/72
Event: Guest DJ Donald Fagen of Steely Dan
Time: 10 pm ET

Tonight we turn the Pure Jazz controls over to Donald Fagen. A jazz fan since his early days of sneaking into the Village Vanguard, Fagen puts on his late-night-jazz-DJ hat and spins the records that have meant the most to him as a musician and a fan.

1/9/2008
'The Nightfly' Still Lives at 25 

By ROBERT J. TOTH

The Wall Street Journal

One of pop music's sneakiest masterpieces has turned 25. Often, an album rises from regular best-seller to classic status because it captures the temper of its times. "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," for instance, simply sounds like 1967, trippy and disarrayed. But "The Nightfly," the 1982 album from songwriter Donald Fagen, gives that standard a twist. Instead of evoking the early '80s, Mr. Fagen captures a different time -- the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, when America was starting to simmer but the '60s hadn't arrived in earnest. Along the way, he pulls off an unmatched bit of alchemy, blending satire and affection without letting one overwhelm the other.

If the album doesn't ring a bell, don't worry. "The Nightfly" has sold more than a million copies and shown enough staying power to get a soup-to-nuts anniversary edition in November from Reprise Records. Yet it never quite made itself inescapable. If you've heard one of the songs, it was probably either "I.G.Y.," a catalog of World's Fair forecasts about the future, or "New Frontier," a frantic, jazzy number about a "summer smoker underground" in a fallout shelter.

You might also know Mr. Fagen, who has a long history of misdirection. As the front man for the band Steely Dan, he co-wrote a decade's worth of hits that hid snarky lyrics under silky harmonies and slick musicianship. "The Nightfly," which arrived a couple of years after the band broke up, was something else altogether. For once, Mr. Fagen stopped being cryptic and opened up to his audience.

As he wrote in the liner notes, the songs "represent certain fantasies that might have been entertained by a young man growing up in the remote suburbs of a northeastern city during the late fifties and early sixties, i.e., one of my general height, weight and build." The cover adds another layer of autobiography. On the front, we see Mr. Fagen as a crew-cut deejay on the graveyard shift. On the back is his audience, a single lighted window in a row of tract homes -- or maybe the artist as a young man, drinking in inspiration.

If so, he didn't forget a thing. Throughout the record, Mr. Fagen draws on obscure corners of American pop for his musical settings -- stuff that got pushed to one side by the British Invasion and then trampled underfoot by the harder sounds of the late '60s. But he's not simply aiming at pastiche. The music always reinforces his themes of innocence and experience.

In "New Frontier," for instance, he uses cocktail-party jazz to set the story of a would-be ladies' man on the make. The music sounds as frenetic as the teenage hero's hormones, and its deliberately cheesy tone matches the kid's skin-deep sophistication. Likewise, "The Goodbye Look" uses a campy tropical backdrop -- the kind a teenager would hear on his parents' cha-cha records -- for a tale of romance and revolution on an island paradise. Mr. Fagen throws in some vocal homages, as well. "Maxine," a story of hand-wringing college romance, gets decked out with soaring harmonies worthy of the Four Freshmen.

The lyrics are just as poignant and precise. Take the opening number, "I.G.Y.," which pokes fun at space-age daydreams. "By '76, we'll be A-OK," the narrator promises, enjoying undersea trains, wheels in space and "Spandex jackets, one for everyone." But Mr. Fagen's vocals never make it seem like he's sneering. He seems to be joking about his own dashed hopes as much as everyone else's, and he clearly has a lot of affection for those forgotten tomorrows.

"New Frontier," meanwhile, turns JFK's famous phrase into a metaphor for the mysteries of sex and adulthood. The song follows a wannabe hipster through a party in his parents' bomb shelter, as he chases a girl "with a touch of Tuesday Weld" and imagines a future that would get big laughs in "The Graduate." "I can't wait till I move to the city," he confides, "till I finally make up my mind to learn design and study overseas." Obviously, Mr. Fagen is having some fun at his hero's expense. But he also seems to have fond memories of just how sexy a vacuum-packed world could be.

The album's most revealing line comes in the title song, narrated by the disc jockey on the cover. "You'd never believe it," he tells his listeners in a weak moment, "but once there was a time when love was in my life."

I sometimes wonder what happened to that flame

The answer's still the same

It was you, it was you

Tonight you're still on my mind

A girl, surely -- but maybe also the America that got swept away by riots, sit-ins and Southeast Asia.

Reprise's reissue moves the story along by bundling in Mr. Fagen's two other solo records -- as well as a bunch of extras -- to make a "three ages of man" trilogy. "Kamakiriad," from 1993, is a witty meditation on middle age and its regrets, told as a sci-fi travelogue through a future America. "Morph the Cat," released in 2006, is the weak leg here: a first-draft effort from a musician who makes a living on precision. As for the extras, you get a lot of hard-to-find songs and multimedia doodads, but the real gems are Mr. Fagen's sly liner notes. In particular, one closing observation: "I'm glad I made 'The Nightfly' before a lot of the kid-ness was beat the hell out of me, as happens to us all." It's a perfect coda for the record -- and a melancholy confirmation of its themes.

11/21/2007
Just A Minute With: Donald Fagen 

By Mark McSherry

NEW YORK (Reuters) - American musician Donald Fagen -- half of jazz-rock duo Steely Dan alongside Walter Becker -- is in no rush to put out a fourth solo album, having taken 25 years to produce the first three.

Outside of Steely Dan, Fagen's three albums -- "The Nightfly," "Kamakiriad," and "Morph The Cat" -- have chronicled various stages in his life and encompassed his love of science fiction and jazz.

Fagen, 59, spoke to Reuters as a box set called "Nightfly Trilogy," pulling together his solo work, was released by Rhino Records:

Q: From the first track of "The Nightfly" and throughout your solo work, the future and science fiction seem to be your thing. Was that always the case?

A: "When I was a kid, I liked science fiction. I actually belonged to something called The Science Fiction Book Club, since I was about 10 or 11, and every month you would get another book. Used to get these big anthologies ... I was pretty deep into science fiction when I was a kid."

Q: Do you look at your three solo albums, from 1982, 1993 and 2006, as one piece of work?

A: "I did the first one ("The Nightfly") and when I was through with it, I realized it was kind of a picture of when I was a kid and I realized it might be cool to look at it a few years later. Then, while I was working on "Kamakiriad" I thought it's almost like those "7 Up" movies where the director looked at these kids (every seven years) and then made "14 Up" and he is still doing it now these kids are in their 50s. It might be interesting just to do one every, you know, whenever I had enough material to do one."

Q: So, you envisage a few more to come then?

A: "Yeah, kind of ... but you know I'm almost 60."

Q: Is there any difference in writing lyrics and music for Donald Fagen as opposed to for Steely Dan?

A: "When I'm writing for myself, it's more autobiographical I guess in a way .... When you are alone you tend to be more intimate or personal. When we are together, we just start laughing and create these characters which I try to embody when I sing. It's kind of like acting."

Q: You went to Bard College, a liberal arts college. Has that been a factor in your career?

A: "The fact that Walter and I both grew up in the 1950s and early 60s as somewhat marginal kids for various reasons in our childhoods. He had a similar interest in science fiction and also we were both jazz fans, which was very unusual for kids who were 11 or 12 ... we were kind of little mini beatniks and somewhat cut off from the junior high school society. So we kind of gravitated toward Bard, which was a liberal arts college, which was very small, and a lot of kids with similar backgrounds gravitated towards the school."

Q: Do you feel there is so much (solo work) still to do?

A: "I've kind of squeezed it in, in between Steely Dan work, both touring and albums, so I sort of do it when I get a chance. When I do it, I focus on it. In a way, I think that is good, because I have time to ... polish it. There's no pressure, there's no deadline, so I just work on the songs until I feel I have something that is really representative of both the years that have just gone by and any musical advancement that I might have made."

Q: Are you always looking to recruit top-notch musicians?

A: "We are always looking. I think the band that we have got right now is our best band really in a way ... In the old days, we were always looking for musicians who had equal facility with jazz and rhythm and blues, which was very difficult to find in those days ... Now, these guys can play anything."

Q: What's next?

A: "I'm back into songwriting mode ... for myself and also talking with Walter about a Steely Dan album. We are planning to go out with Steely Dan in the summer (playing live) and maybe next fall (2008) I'm hoping to go out with my band ...We are having a lot of fun in our old age."