THE STEELY DAN INTERNET RESOURCE
Influences on the Steely Dan sound
As chosen by Donald Fagen in the Dec. 18, 1993 issue of "Melody Maker."
ARTISTS WHO INFLUENCED
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| Artist | Representative work |
Fagen comment |
| Miles Davis | It Could Happen To You | "These milestone sessions opened me up to the power of music. I lived in New Jersey and used to listen to late-night jazz stations from Manhattan, and that's where I heard this. Jazz affected be in a way R&B records really didn't. The fact that I didn't understand it made it very powerful for me." |
| Sonny Rollins | Where Are You | "This is a ballad from his famous album The Bridge. I'd really liked his work in the Fifties and I was hoping he'd come out of retirement. When this appeared in the Sixties, his style had changed. He was much more controlled. Rather than trying to imitate Coltrane, as so many players did, he'd assimilated it into his own style." |
| Oliver Nelson |
Blues And The Abstract Truth | "A very popular jazz record with a kind of mainstream, big band sound. Nelson had a West Coast sound, and the contrast between (altoist) Eric Dolphy's (sound) solos and that slick, swinging rhythm section was very interesting to me." |
| Charlie Mingus | Slop | "The first time I played it, I thought it was terrible. I thought the band was a mess and I couldn't figure out why people kept yelling... About a year later, I put it on again, thought it was brilliant, and couldn't stop playing it. There was something about the rootsy feeling that I had come to accept. It was angry, with a lot of church and blues feeling..." |
| Clifford Brown | Dahood | "This is the studio version and part of a very important bunch of records that influenced popular music a lot. I used to think Clifford Brown's style was too stiff and formal. It was the basis, along with Fats Navarro, for the Blue Note style of funky or soul jazz. I was very snobbish about that when I was a kid. I thought they were just stringing together blues cliches. But later I started to appreciate these people for their power and went back to Clifford Brown. A lot of the live recordings sound great, particularly when he had Sonny Rollins and Harold Land in the band." |
| Thelonious
Monk (sound) |
Monk's Dream | "Monk injects an incredible blues sensibility into everything he does. He's trying to bend the piano like you would a guitar. And this has Frankie Dunlop on drums. He's probably my favorite drummer to confront whatever needed to be confronted. In this case in a very funny song that puts me in a good mood, "The way things are going/They're gonna crucify me." I mean, you never hear that anywhere." |
| Bob Dylan | It's All Over Now, Baby Blue | "An astounding record. You get to hear on this what a fantastic singer he was. His range, which now, as far as I can tell, has reduced to a perfect fifth, used to be enormous. He starts very high on the verse and then drops an octave in about a second and sounds like he's doing a duet with himself. A perfect record." |
| The Band | Tears of Rage | "Another Dylan song, from "Music With Big Pink," a record that really changed rock 'n' roll. Whether for better or worse, I don't know. Everything was influenced by it at the time. It was the contrapuntal, improvised group playing, plus the dynamics and harmonies were unpredictable and had kind of a gospel effect. The singing was spectacular -- three fantastic singers, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. There's never been anything else like it. It was on a much higher level than any other records in those days -- homemade and beautiful-sounding." |
| Dionne Warwick | In The Land of Make Believe | "This is a straight ahead pop song in intent, but Burt Bacharach is brilliant. He was Marlene Dietrich's musical director for a while, and he utilized a lot of French classical music for her stuff. Poulenc and Debussy were his models and, when applied to soul and gospel, it had this very ethereal effect, especially with Dionne Warwick's voice. I love this combination of classicism and soul. Walter Becker and I were both huge fans of Burt Bacharach records and they were definitely an influence." |
| Ray Charles | Have I Got News For You | "A big band record with arrangements by Quincy Jones. Straight ahead, stop-time blues, great words. I'm sure no one's ever done this as well as Ray Charles did. He's just the greatest singer in the world and it still sounds good." |
| The Lovin' Spoonful | Do You Believe In Magic? | "Very big when I was making the transition from jazz fan to pop fan. This always puts me in a good mood. John Sebastian (sound) is incredibly underrated. He was a fine songwriter and a great singer. These days, he's kind of a forgotten man. I guess what did him in was that song Daydream, which people got really sick of and typified The Lovin' Spoonful as sugary, good-timey music. But it wasn't typical of his work at all. There's some great music on those records. The lyrics on this are all about youth and optimism and it was probably one of the first records that celebrated rock 'n' roll for itself, pulled back and looked at what was going on culturally." |
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