Steely Dan's Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are the featured guests on the latest episode of InTheStudio: The Stories Behind History's Greatest Rock Bands.The Steely Dan duo return for a second week to celebrate the anniversary of their landmark album, Aja. The show sent over these details:
October 1977 Aja would be Steely Dan's highest charting album (peaking at # 3 on U.S. charts) and their first platinum seller, eventually selling over 3 million copies within a year of release. Coming in at an impressive #145 on Rolling Stone's Top 500 Albums of All Time, Aja introduced a generation to the jazz fusion movement that was gaining momentum and now had found its commercial ticket.
Donald Fagen tells 'InTheStudio' host Redbeard how Aja was a move into a new direction for Steely Dan. "To some degree we wanted to get back to more complex harmony and go back to some of the jazz harmony we'd grown up with . . There was also some interesting things happening in what they call fusion, it was the beginning of the fusion era between musicians who seemed to be successfully adapting some of the technics of blues and Rock to Jazz and vice versa." Listen here.
