This past week Walter Becker, half of Steely Dan, died. The band of smoky rhythms and salty lyrics, jazzy-but-not-jazz, probably the best band of the nineteen seventies. Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, the duo that called themselves Steely Dan, take time to get to know, introverted in music as they were in life. But the best ones always are. In art, to be the best you have to be knowable, but not easy to know. The ones easy to know aren't usually worth knowing, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde excepted. Art doesn't have to be personal, but if you put a lot of yourself into something, even if it is not you, it will be like you, tending to wind complex and deep like a network of cypress roots.
Becker and Fagan forgot more about recording than I ever could know. It is said that their 1977 best-selling album Aja was so sonically perfect that engineers use it to test audio systems for flaws. And yet for their formidable skills in the mixing booth, they never went for electronic or digital effects, instead seeking to make music sound like music and not like something else. No electronic sound effects, no synthesizers -- the electric piano was the most exotic sound they sought; their sound was natural instrumentation. They were interested in recording music, not making recordings, and there is a difference.
This traditiona approach appeals to me. Always has. Steely Dan’s adherence to standard voice and musical instruments, pure and clean, no distortion or overdrive or vocal filtering — music and nothing but — was a traditional approach to music. Music that could be replicated onstage with standard equipment, provided the musicians had the nerve to perform songs that were so clean and sonically transparent that mistakes were inconcealable. This traditional style may have limited the breadth of their sound, a slick blend of jazz and rock, but tradition notwithstanding, the tracks they laid down sounded only like them.
That is my theory of art as well -- you get more mileage out of stretching traditions than breaking them. I don't get much from music that takes a vocal note and electronically washes it into something that sounds like an electric violin. I don't go for the helicopter sounds, or the sound of a car squealing to a halt transformed into a closing coda. I like musicians to be musicians and to stick to their instruments. That doesn't mean I reject modern sound techniques. But I don't like them, sonically, as much as I like a really good guitarist squeezing the last drop of timbre out of his instrument. Like the guitar solo in "Rikki Don’t Lose that Number," for my money the finest guitar lead in rock history.
And chord changes. Slinky, grooving chord changes. Chord changes are what really make music, because without them all you have is a beat, and a beat is not music. Melody is music, but entirely too thin to hang a song on. You can whistle a tune but not a chord, which is why no one ever pays money to listen to someone whistle, or even to hear a solo instrument that can’t bang out two notes at the same time. No, it takes harmony to bring music to life, and a chord is harmony.
Chord changes are harmony going somewhere, and Steely Dan was in love with chord changes. Chord changes in popular music tend to be simple, so simple as to be non-existent, I to IV to V and back to I, with the occasional minor chord thrown in -- the simplest changes possible (trust me if you don't know music, I-IV-V chord sequences are is the first thing you learn). But they doesn't turn me on like the wicked G6/9-F#7#9-F6//9-E7#9-Eb6/9-D7#9 business that opens “Peg.” This sequence is not simply the musical tension typical of jazz, with the ninths and the sharps going for it, but also a smooth stepdown from beginning to end, G-F#-F-E-Eb-D, a half-step with each change, that ease-on-down that is the spirit of jazz slink.
Becker and Fagan wanted to produce good music, and they wanted music that sounded good on every level. Isolate the drums, the bass, keyboards, anything on a Steely Dan song, and there is enough going on to listen to that single thread all the way through. Even on paper, all those sharps and flat look better, like something’s goin’ on.
It looks like thought went into it. Like you can trust it. When a master artist works, you can trust that every stroke is intentional — nothing is happenstance, no effect unintentional, every word or gesture or brushstroke or musical note meant to be there. The jazz giant Thelonious Monk famously said that the best music comes from mistakes, but he didn’t mean that he made errors in his work and then made the best of them. He meant that in a great work of art, the eccentricities of the work were meant to be there and belong, every bit as much as the more comprehensible parts. He meant that every note in a really good song matters, and they all play off each other. No mistakes, only happy faults — abnormalities that belong in the overall plan just as much as the more conventional elements do, like the way a knot in a plank of wood makes it look more real than if the entire board is made up of flawless wood fibers running the same way.
When a master artist goes to work you know the mistakes were meant to be there. The discord is just as intentional as the harmony. You can listen to it, think about it, without concern that you are wasting your time considering an accidental effect, one that never occurred to the artist. You can trust that the mistakes belong.
That's what it is — trust. I trust Steely Dan. Trust them anew with every re-listen.
Photo of Steely Dan at the Pori Jazz Fesival courtesy of Kotivalo, posted in Wikicommons.