Product Description
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A vivid portrait of a '70s record that is still as fresh and
memorable today as when it was released more than two decades
ago. Pioneering pop/jazz band Steely Dan, formed by Donald Fagen
and Walter Becker in the early seventies, had already secured
five Top 40 albums before the release of Aja in 1977. Aja,
however, was to prove to be the biggest selling album of Steely
Dan's illustrious career, reaching No. 3 on the Billboard chart
and spending a year in the Top 40. Becker and Fagen, renowned for
their relentless perfectionism in the studio, recall
the history of an album that was a year in the making, but
rewarded with a Grammy Award and three hit singles. Steely Dan's
Aja has proven to be one of the most outstanding jazz-rock albums
in the history of popular music and now its story is told in this
fascinating documentary. 60 minutes.
.com
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This profile of Steely Dan's elegant 1977 masterpiece, Aja (
/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00003002C/${0} ), is a feast for Dan fans, a
thoughtful, satisfyingly detailed assessment of the album and its
bejeweled fusion of jazz, R&B, rock, and pop. Better yet, the
documentary's producers elicit atypically straightforward,
revealing interviews from the group's stealthy principals,
songwriters Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who jettison enough
of their signature sarcasm to touch on the autobiographical
threads, cultural anomie, and serious musical ambition audible in
their work. In that respect, the production rivals any extant
interviews with this proudly cerebral, occasionally evasive
musical team.
The duo, along with producer Gary Katz, engineer Roger Nichols,
and a generous cross-section of the crack New York and Los
Angeles musicians featured on the sessions, dissect the sleek
layers of the songs both musically and lyrically, both in modern
performances featuring the original players and in control-room
playbacks of the original multitrack master tapes. Becker and
Fagen prove articulate, self-aware, and dryly funny subjects, and
the subtlety and richness of the music offer an ample canvas for
discovery. --Sam Sutherland
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Additional Features
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Originally produced for cable and home video as a documentary
project, the Classic Albums series offers in-depth profiles of
enduring rock and pop albums built around first-person interviews
with the artists, producers, and musicians that created them.
That audio focus creates an ironic, largely perceptual problem
for DVD release, since the segments aren't intended to replace
the original audio s, only to expand upon them: these
are conventional DVDs, not harbingers of true audio DVD optimized
for sonic resolution, and they are not mixed to exploit surround
playback. If you haven't heard these albums, nearly all of them
landmarks in late-20th-century pop, then this isn't the place to
start, and Aja magnifies that issue through the very high
standard of the original audio (
/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00003002C/${0} ), itself a true audiophile
work. If you do know the album, however, the Classic Albums
presentation is a handsomely produced, revealing companion. --Sam
Sutherland
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