Jazz singer and acclaimed author of bios
on Mark Murphy and Jon Hendricks, Peter Jones has scored a hat trick with Nightfly: The Life of Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen. Despite lacking the assistance of his subject,
Jones’ 368 page tome is insightful, heavily researched and spares no detail. It
picks up the Steely Dan tale post 1994 when Brian Sweeting’s Reelin' in the Years was published. This includes new and
valuable coverage of Fagen's solo albums Morph the Cat (2006) and Sunken Condos (2012) which are welcome and important
additions to Fagen’s oeuvre.
Jones' analogies between SD and the Beatles do ring somewhat true with the “who wrote what” question as is the case with Lennon/McCartney and, for that matter, Ellington/Strayhorn. Especially with the strong love for and the jazz influences evident in the music of Fagen and his band, and writing partner, Walter Becker.
As session guitarist, Jay
Graydon (who played on some SD albums)
says - “there is no doubt that Jones has put a lot of work into doing accurate
research”. Being a film noir buff myself, I can only agree with Jones’ note -
‘Steely Dan were the closest thing in rock music to film noir’. Indeed so, as
the soundtracks to the film noir genre were often jazz themed. Examples of
which are Miles Davis’ improvised score to the French film Elevator to the Gallows (Lift to the Scaffold in the UK), Johnny Mandel’s I Want to Live (1959) as
well as John Dankworth’s The Servant
(1963). One could argue that Steely
Dan’s 1970s' output would carry on this practice as they also did in utilising
jazz musicians like Victor Feldman, Tom Scott, Pete Christlieb, Steve Gadd and
Wayne Shorter as well as funky soulsters such as Bernard Purdie, Chuck Rainey and
Paul Griffin.
Jones also fully explores
the love and devotion for jazz by Becker and Fagen. Nightfly was actually the radio moniker of Mort Fega a legendary
jazz radio host on WEVD FM in NYC in the early 1960s. A programme Fagen listened to regularly as a
teenager.
There is also a wonderful
discussion on page 248 of Donald and Walter’s appearance on pianist Marian
McPartland’s long running radio show Piano Jazz in 2002 on NPR (America’s
equivalent to the BBC). When asked who
his favourite guitarist was, Walter answered Grant Green. Not a name one would
have expected from a member of a rock band. At the end of the programme Donald
and Marian performed a duet of Mercer Ellington’s Things Ain’t What They Used To
Be, which was one of the few occasions where they recorded a jazz tune
apart from their version of Ellington’s East
St Louis Toodle-oo from their Pretzel Logic LP in 1974.
Nightfly
is a comprehensive, critical biography that will appeal not only to both Fagen
and Steely Dan devotees but to any music fans that relish the behind the scenes
insights of the vinyl era. Frank Griffith*
Peter Jones, Nightfly: The Life of Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen Chicago Review Press. ISBN-10: 1641606878
*Please note that a
paperback edition will be published in April 2024 with an added chapter examining Fagen’s
songwriting.
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