Aja (album)

Aja (/ˈeɪʒə/, pronounced like Asia) is the sixth studio album by the American jazz rock band Steely Dan. It was released in September 1977 by ABC Records. Recording alongside nearly 40 musicians, band leaders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker pushed Steely Dan further into experimenting with different combinations of session players while pursuing longer, more sophisticated compositions for the album.

Aja
Studio album by
Steely Dan
ReleasedSeptember 1977
RecordedJanuary–July 1977
Studio
Genre
Length39:51
LabelABC
ProducerGary Katz
Steely Dan chronology
The Royal Scam
(1976)		 Aja
(1977)		 Gaucho
(1980)
Singles from Aja
  1. "Peg"
    Released: November 1977
  2. "Deacon Blues"
    Released: March 1978
  3. "Josie"
    Released: August 1978

The album peaked at number three on the US charts and number five in the UK, ultimately becoming Steely Dan's most commercially successful LP. It spawned a number of hit singles, including "Peg", "Deacon Blues", and "Josie". In July 1978, Aja won the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical and received Grammy nominations for Album of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. It has since appeared frequently on professional rankings of the greatest albums, with critics and audiophiles applauding the album's high production standards.

Recording

The album was produced by Steely Dan's longtime producer Gary Katz[1] and features several leading session musicians. The eight-minute-long title track features jazz-based changes and a solo by saxophonist Wayne Shorter.[2][3]

Title and packaging

The album's title is pronounced like Asia.[4] Donald Fagen has said the album was named for a Korean woman who married the brother of one of his high-school friends.[5] The cover photo by Hideki Fujii features Japanese model and actress Sayoko Yamaguchi[6][7] and was designed by Patricia Mitsui and Geoff Westen. The late actor/comedian Phil Hartman, a graphic designer earlier in his career is often falsely attributed for having designed the cover. The inside photos were taken by Walter Becker and Dorothy A. White.[8]

Marketing and sales

Aja was released in September 1977 by ABC Records.[9] In anticipation of the release, Katz urged the relatively private Fagen and Becker to raise their public profile, including a meeting with Irving Azoff for his services as their manager. "We were ready to go blissfully through life without a manager", Fagen said at the time.[1]

With Azoff's connections to record stores and offering the album at a discounted price, Aja became "one of the season's hottest albums and by far Steely Dan’s fastest-selling ever", according to Cameron Crowe in the December 1977 issue of Rolling Stone.[1] Within three weeks of release, the album reached the top five of the US albums chart,[10] ultimately peaking at number three. It also reached number five on the UK albums chart.[9] According to Billboard, it became the band's "biggest hit" and "one of the first albums to be certified platinum".[10]

When DTS attempted to make a 5.1 version, it was discovered that the multitrack masters for both "Black Cow" and the title track were missing. For this same reason, a multichannel SACD version was cancelled by Universal Music. Donald Fagen has offered a $600 reward for the missing masters or any information that leads to their recovery.[11]

Critical reception and legacy
Retrospective professional reviews
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[12]
Chicago Tribune[13]
Christgau's Record GuideB+[14]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music[15]
MusicHound Rock4.5/5[16]
Pitchfork10/10[17]
Q[18]
Rolling Stone[19]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide[20]
Tom HullA–[21]

Reviewing in 1977 for Rolling Stone, Michael Duffy said that "the conceptual framework of [Steely Dan's] music has shifted from the pretext of rock & roll toward a smoother, awesomely clean and calculated mutation of various rock, pop and jazz idioms", while their lyrics "remain as pleasantly obtuse and cynical as ever". Duffy added that while the duo's "extreme intellectual self-consciousness" was beginning to show its limitations, the latter "may be precisely the quality that makes Walter Becker and Donald Fagen the perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies."[22] Robert Christgau of The Village Voice initially "hated" the record before he "realized that, unlike The Royal Scam, it was stretching me some", while noting that he was "grateful to find Fagen and Becker's collegiate cynicism in decline". However, he believed the band's preference for longer, more sophisticated songs "could turn into their fatal flaw".[23] Greg Kot was also lukewarm toward the band's stylistic departure, later writing in the Chicago Tribune: "The clinical coldness first evidenced on The Royal Scam is perfected here. Longer, more languid songs replace the acerbic pithiness of old."[13] Barry Walters was more receptive in a retrospective review for Rolling Stone, saying "rock has always excelled at embodying adolescent ache. But it's rare when rock captures the complications of adult sorrows almost purely with its sound."[19] Jazz historian Ted Gioia cites it as an example of Steely Dan "proving that pop-rock could equally benefit from a healthy dose of jazz" during their original tenure, which coincided with a period when rock musicians frequently experimented with jazz idioms and techniques.[24]

The album has been cited by music journalists as one of the best test recordings for audiophiles, due to its high production standards.[25][26][27] Walters noted in his review "the album's surreal sonic perfection, its melodic and harmonic complexity - music so technically demanding its creators had to call in A-list session players to realize the sounds they heard in their heads but could not play, even on the instruments they had mastered."[19] Reviewing Aja's 2007 all-analog LP reissue, Ken Kessler from Hi-Fi News & Record Review gave top marks to both recording and performance qualities, calling the album "sublime jazz-rock that hasn't aged at all - unless you consider 'intelligence' passe - it is everything you expected the painfully hip/cool Becker and Fagen to deliver."[28]

Accolades

Aja has frequently appeared on rankings of the greatest albums of all time. In 1991, France's Rock & Folk included Aja on a list of the 250 best albums released during the magazine's existence, beginning in 1966. In 1999, it was ranked 59th on the national Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth's "Top 99 Albums of All Time".[29] In 2000 it was voted number 118 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums.[30] In 2003, the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and ranked number 145 on Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list,[31] maintaining the rating in a 2012 revised list.[32] In 2006, Aja was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.[33] In 2010, the Library of Congress selected Aja for inclusion in the United States National Recording Registry based on its cultural, artistic or historical significance.[34][35]

Based on such rankings, the aggregate website Acclaimed Music lists Aja as 98th most acclaimed album of the 1970s and the 315th most acclaimed album in history.[29]

Classic Albums episode

In 1999, Aja was covered for an episode of the British documentary series Classic Albums, featuring a song-by-song study of the album (the only omission being "I Got the News", which is played during the closing credits), interviews with Steely Dan co-founders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen (among others) plus new, live-in-studio versions of songs from the album. Becker and Fagen also play back several of the rejected guitar solos for "Peg", which were recorded before Jay Graydon produced the satisfactory take. Andy Gill, one of the other interviewees, said: "Jazz-rock was a fundamental part of the 70s musical landscape … [Steely Dan] wasn't rock or pop music with ideas above its station, and it wasn't jazzers slumming … it was a very well-forged alloy of the two – you couldn't separate the pop music from the jazz in their music." Discussing the album's sound, British musician Ian Dury said in the episode that he heard elements of legendary jazz musicians like Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, and Art Blakey. "Well, Aja's got a sound that lifts your heart up, and it's the most consistent up-full, heart-warming … even though, it is a classic LA kinda sound", Dury explained. "You wouldn't think it was recorded anywhere else in the world. It's got California through its blood, even though they are boys from New York … They've got a skill that can make images that aren't puerile and don't make you think you've heard it before … very 'Hollywood filmic' in a way, the imagery is very imaginable, in a visual sense."[5]

Yacht rock

In retrospective appraisals, Aja has been discussed by music journalists as an important release in the development of yacht rock. For Spin in 2009, Chuck Eddy lists it among the genre's eight essential albums.[36] Writing for uDiscoverMusic in 2019, Paul Sexton said that with the album, Steely Dan "announced their ever-greater exploration of jazz influences" that would lead to "their yacht-rock masterpiece" in 1980's Gaucho.[37] Patrick Hosken from MTV News said that both Aja and Gaucho show how "great yacht rock is also more musically ambitious than it might seem, tying blue-eyed soul and jazz to funk and R&B".[38] Aja was included in Vinyl Me, Please magazine's list of the 10 best yacht rock albums, with an accompanying essay that said: "Steely Dan’s importance to yacht rock can’t be overstated. … Arguably the Dan is smoothest on the 1980 smash Gaucho, but Aja finds Walter Becker and Donald Fagen comfortably hitting a middle-ground stride … as a mainstream hit factory while remaining expansive and adventurous".[39] John Lawler from Something Else! said, "The song and performance that best exemplifies the half-time, funky, laid (way) back in the beat shuffle within the jazz-pop environment of the mid- to late- 70s can be found on 'Home at Last.' Bernard “Pretty” Purdie feeds off Chuck Rainey’s bass with righteous grooves and masterful off-beat fills with alacrity in this tight band favorite."[40]

Track listing

All songs written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.

Side one
No.TitleLength
1."Black Cow"5:10
2."Aja"7:57
3."Deacon Blues"7:33
Side two
No.TitleLength
1."Peg"3:58
2."Home at Last"5:34
3."I Got the News"5:06
4."Josie"4:33
Total length:39:51

Personnel

Steely Dan[41]

  • Donald Fagen – lead vocals (all tracks), synthesizer (all tracks but 4), police whistle (2), backing vocals (2, 5, 7)
  • Walter Becker – bass guitar (3), guitar (2), guitar solo (5, 6, 7)

Additional musicians

Production

  • Executive producer: Stephen Diener [ABC Records]
  • Producer: Gary Katz
  • Engineers: Roger Nichols, Elliot Scheiner, Al Schmitt, Bill Schnee
  • Assistant engineers: Joe Bellamy, Lenise Bent, Ken Klinger, Ron Pangaliman, Ed Rack, Linda Tyler
  • Mastering: Bernie Grundman
  • Production coordination: Barbara Miller
  • Sound consultant: Dinky Dawson
  • Consultant: Daniel Levitin
  • Horn arrangements: Tom Scott
  • Art direction: Oz Studios, [8], Vartan Reissue
  • Design: Patricia Mitsui, Geoff Westen
  • Photography: Hideki Fujii (cover photo), Walter Becker, Dorothy A. White
  • Liner notes: Walter Becker, Donald Fagen
  • Reissue coordination: Beth Stempel

Outtakes

The sessions for Aja produced several outtakes, including "The Bear Got You". The song was never officially released, but would later be played live on their 2011 Shuffle Diplomacy tour.[42]

Awards

Grammy Awards

Year Winner Category
1977 Aja Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical

Certifications
Region CertificationCertified units/sales
Canada (Music Canada)[43] 2× Platinum 200,000^
United Kingdom (BPI)[44] Silver 60,000^
United States (RIAA)[45] 2× Platinum 2,000,000^

^shipments figures based on certification alone

References
  1. Crowe, Cameron (December 29, 1977). "Steely Dan Springs Back: The Second Coming". Rolling Stone. New York City: Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. (#255): 11. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
  2. Cook-Wilson, Winston (September 27, 2017). "Steely Dan's Aja: Remembering the Band's Trailblazing Moment 40 Years Later". SPIN. Retrieved July 25, 2019.
  3. Myers, Marc (July 15, 2011). "How Steely Dan Got Wayne Shorter". Jazz Wax.
  4. Palmer, Robert (October 9, 1977). "American's Finest Maybe-Rock Non-Band". The New York Times. Retrieved July 3, 2020.
  5. Classic Albums: Steely Dan – Aja (Video 1999), Directed by Alan Lewins, Eagle Rock Entertainment, ASIN: 6305772649
  6. Holmes, Chris. "Album cover of the week: Aja". The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Retrieved September 9, 2008.
  7. Sweet, Brian (2016). Steely Dan: Reelin in the Years. Omnibus Press. p. 130. ISBN 9781468313147.
  8. "Steely Dan – Aja (red vinyl): Scan of the inner sleeve". Vinyl Album Covers.com. http://vinylalbumcovers.com/steely-dan-aja-red-vinyl
  9. Anon. (2007). "Steely Dan - Aja". In Irvin, Jim; McLear, Colin (eds.). The Mojo Collection (4th ed.). Canongate Books. p. 389. ISBN 1-84767-643-X.
  10. Anon. (n.d.). "Steely Dan Biography". Billboard. Archived from the original on September 23, 2015. Retrieved September 23, 2015.
  11. Broberg, Tomas. "Aja notes". Tribute To Steely Dan - Steely Dan Interzone. Archived from the original on May 5, 2009. Retrieved May 13, 2009.
  12. Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. "Aja – Steely Dan". AllMusic. Retrieved August 14, 2015.
  13. Kot, Greg (August 16, 1992). "Thrills, Scams and Nightflys". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved February 15, 2017.
  14. Christgau, Robert (1981). "Consumer Guide '70s: S". Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies. Ticknor & Fields. ISBN 089919026X. Retrieved March 9, 2019 – via robertchristgau.com.
  15. Larkin, Colin (2011). "Steely Dan". The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (5th concise ed.). Omnibus Press. ISBN 978-0-85712-595-8.
  16. Graff, Gary; Durchholz, Daniel, eds. (1999). "Steely Dan". MusicHound Rock: The Essential Album Guide. Farmington Hills, MI: Visible Ink Press. ISBN 1-57859-061-2.
  17. Petrusich, Amanda (November 20, 2019). "Steely Dan: Aja". Pitchfork. Retrieved November 24, 2019.
  18. "Steely Dan: Aja". Q. London (165): 131. June 2000.
  19. Walters, Barry (August 30, 2001). "Steely Dan: Aja". Rolling Stone. New York. Archived from the original on May 9, 2006. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
  20. Sheffield, Rob (2004). "Steely Dan". In Brackett, Nathan; Hoard, Christian (eds.). The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (4th ed.). Simon & Schuster. pp. 778–79. ISBN 0-7432-0169-8.
  21. Hull, Tom (n.d.). "Rock (1970s)". tomhull.com. Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  22. Duffy, Michael (December 1, 1977). "Steely Dan: Aja". Rolling Stone. New York. Retrieved April 29, 2013.
  23. Christgau, Robert (October 31, 1977). "Christgau's Consumer Guide". The Village Voice. New York. Retrieved April 29, 2013.
  24. Gioia, Ted (2011). The History of Jazz. Oxford University Press. p. 332. ISBN 9780199831876.
  25. "The 30 best hi-fi audiophile albums ever | Tech Features | Stuff". www.stuff.tv. Retrieved November 8, 2015.
  26. "What Are the Top 10 Digital Tracks for Testing Speakers? – A Journal of Musical Things". A Journal of Musical Things. Retrieved November 8, 2015.
  27. "Vinyl Me, Please | 52 Essential Albums to Own on Vinyl (Add Your Own) «". vinylmeplease.com. Retrieved November 8, 2015.
  28. Kessler, Ken (March 2008). "Music Reviews". Hi-Fi News & Record Review. p. 83.
  29. "Aja". Acclaimed Music. Retrieved October 31, 2019.
  30. Colin Larkin (2000). All Time Top 1000 Albums (3rd ed.). Virgin Books. p. 80. ISBN 0-7535-0493-6.
  31. "GRAMMY Hall Of Fame". grammy.org. Retrieved May 24, 2017.
  32. "500 Greatest Albums of All Time Rolling Stone's definitive list of the 500 greatest albums of all time". Rolling Stone. 2012. Retrieved September 18, 2019.
  33. Robert Dimery; Michael Lydon (February 7, 2006). 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: Revised and Updated Edition. Universe. ISBN 0-7893-1371-5.
  34. "Complete National Recording Registry Listing – National Recording Preservation Board | Programs | Library of Congress". Loc.gov. Retrieved November 8, 2015.
  35. "About This Program – National Recording Preservation Board". Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  36. Eddy, Chuck (January 1, 2009). "8 Essential Yacht Rock Albums". Spin. Retrieved June 8, 2020.
  37. Sexton, Paul (September 17, 2019). "Yacht Rock: A Boatload Of Guilty Pleasures". uDiscoverMusic. Retrieved October 31, 2019.
  38. Hosken, Patrick (February 7, 2017). "Are We in the Middle of a Yacht-Rock Revival". MTV News. Retrieved October 31, 2019.
  39. Malcolm, Timothy (February 20, 2017). "The 10 Best Yacht Rock Albums To Own On Vinyl". Vinyl Me, Please. Retrieved October 31, 2019.
  40. "Best Steely Dan drumming performances: Steely Dan Sunday". somethingelsereviews.com. November 20, 2014. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  41. "Aja - Steely Dan | Credits". AllMusic. Retrieved March 8, 2020.
  42. Baltin, Steve (July 9, 2011). "Steely Dan at the Greek Theater: Concert Review". The Hollywood Reporter.
  43. "Canadian album certifications – Steely Dan – Aja". Music Canada.
  44. "British album certifications – Steely Dan – Aja". British Phonographic Industry. Select albums in the Format field. Select Silver in the Certification field. Type Aja in the "Search BPI Awards" field and then press Enter.
  45. "American album certifications – Steely Dan – Aja". Recording Industry Association of America. If necessary, click Advanced, then click Format, then select Album, then click SEARCH. 

Further reading
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