Steely Dan's Aja (33 1/3) (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: modal jazz, black cow, tonal center, Steely Dan, Deacon Blues, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Aja was the album that made Steely Dan a commercial force on the order of contemporaries like Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles and Chicago. A double-platinum, Grammy-winning bestseller, it lingered on the Billboard charts for more than a year and spawned three hit singles. Odd, then, that its creators saw it as an "ambitious, extended" work, the apotheosis of their anti-rock, anti-band, anti-glamour aesthetic. Populated by thirty-five mostly jazz session players, Aja served up prewar song forms, mixed meters and extended solos to a generation whose idea of pop daring was Paul letting Linda sing lead once in a while. And, impossibly, it sold. Including an in-depth interview with Donald Fagen, this book paints a detailed picture of the making of a masterpiece.

About the Author

Don Breithaupt is the author of two acclaimed books on pop music for St. Martins and an acclaimed jazz composer and keyboard player. He writes extensively on music for the National Post in Toronto, and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation.

Product Details

• Paperback: 130 pages
• Publisher: Continuum; First edition. edition (May 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826427839
• ISBN-13: 978-0826427830
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 4.7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #23,030 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #32 in	Books > Entertainment > Music > Theory, Composition & Performance > Theory
  #58 in	Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Composers & Musicians > Rock
  #82 in	Books > Entertainment > Music > History & Criticism

• This item is part of The Thirty Three and a Third Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, comprehensive, entertaining, June 4, 2007

By	S. Armour (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Finally, a piece of writing worthy of Steely Dan. Don Breithaupt, himself a Juno-nominated musician, tells the inside story of the making of this classic through exclusive interviews with Fagen and many of the major players. He places Aja in the context of the Dan catalogue, of pop culture, even song-writing history. He expertly deconstructs lyrics, chord patterns, instrumentation, gives us insider-studio details, making-of stories, and does it in engaging -- often hilarious -- language. Casual readers will be engrossed. Serious musicians will reference it over and over. And Becker & Fagen fanatics will get the answer to the question so many of them ask: How the hell did they DO that?

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Love the idea. The execution, not so much., August 27, 2009

By	Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Don Breithaupt, Aja (Continuum, 2007)

I've been hearing about Continuum's 33 1/3 series of books for years now, and I decided that if I was going to get into the series, I might as well start with a book based on one of the greatest albums of all time, Steely Dan's 1978 smash Aja. I should say when writing this that I've been a musician on the practical side since the early eighties, and was also on the theoretical side briefly in the late eighties, so I do have some basic idea of how you put a song together, and I had a little training in music theory (a couple of semesters' worth). I could make heads and/or tails of about half this book. Worse, Breithaupt's "comprehensive" glossary is anything but, unless he assumes that people who have even less musical knowledge than I will understand such sentences as this: "The animus behind the verse in 'Peg' is this: for each of the standard three chords of a twelve-bar blues (tonic, subdominant and dominant [sic]), substitute a plagal cadence...". Plagal? Umm, what? And this is before he starts getting technical.

When you're reading the parts that actually sound like English, Breithaupt's thesis is a simple one: Steely Dan, and especially the Steely Dan that released Aja (and Gaucho as well), was very much a product of its time, something that could have come neither before (when rock had not advanced to a point where rock bands were willing to react against it) or after (the eighties, when FM radio fragmented the market irrevocably). All well and good, and even Steely Dan's harshest critics (though they're probably thankful) would find it impossible to argue that Aja is unique in the world of rock and roll; nothing else sounds like it, nothing else sounds even remotely like it. Okay, I'm along for the ride there. I'm certainly down with the concept of Breithaupt trying to explain why the record is unique; the problem is that only the deepest-involved of theory geeks is going to get some of this stuff. (Granted, if you're willing to take everything he says at face value, you can float along, and you'll pick some of the basics up through context.) I also, though this will be a personal preference for most readers, wonder why Breithaupt persists in avoiding the easiest interpretation of any given lyric. He mentions, at one point, seven different possible answers to the question "What is 'Aja' about?" (not counting his own, "about eight minutes"). None of them addresses the obvious idea that it's simply a creative misspelling ("Chinese music under banyan trees", quoted earlier in the book, notwithstanding). I'm not saying that's the right interpretation (I am of the school that believes any interpretation a reader/listener comes up with that can be backed up with textual evidence is valid), I'm just saying it's the most obvious, and it's entirely ignored. The same thing happens with "Deacon Blues" (come on, are you seriously going to tell me this song is not, at least in part, an elegy?).

Not a bad book, but seriously over-technical. Hoping the other books in the series approach their albums from a different angle. ***

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read, January 18, 2008

By	SpiderFromMars88 "spiderfrommars88" (Vineland, New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews

Even though the book is heavy on complex music analysis, it's still a very entertaining read. If you're a Steely Dan fan, this is a book you should read.