Aja (1977)

Aja (pronounced , like Asia) is the sixth studio album by the American rock band Steely Dan, released on September 23, 1977, by ABC Records. For the album, band leaders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen pushed Steely Dan further into experimenting with different combinations of session players, enlisting the services of nearly 40 musicians, while pursuing longer, more sophisticated compositions and arrangements. Like all the band's previous albums, it was produced by Gary Katz.

The album peaked at number three on the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart, and number five on the UK Albums Chart, ultimately becoming Steely Dan's most commercially successful release. It spawned the hit singles "Peg", "Deacon Blues", and "Josie". At the 20th Annual Grammy Awards in 1978, Aja won Best Engineered Recording – Non-Classical, and was nominated for Album of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. It has appeared on many retrospective "greatest albums" lists, with critics and audiophiles applauding the album's high production quality. In 2010, the album was added to the National Recording Registry by Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Background and recording

A jazz rock, jazz fusion, jazz pop, progressive jazz, smooth jazz, experimental, blue-eyed soul and yacht rock album, Aja was produced by Steely Dan's longtime producer Gary Katz, engineered by longtime master engineers Roger Nichols and Bill Schnee and features contributions from numerous leading session musicians.

Co-composer and co-band leader Walter Becker did not perform on the tracks "Black Cow" or "Peg". Victor Feldman's Fender Rhodes piano solo on "Black Cow" was recorded at the same time as the basic instruments on the track, a break from Steely Dan's usual recording practice.

The eight-minute-long title track is composed of a number of different sections which were written independently of each other and then strung together. The middle section, for instance, was adapted from an instrumental called "Stand by the Seawall" which dates back to before Steely Dan's formation, and was among the songs Becker and Fagen played when auditioning for the band Demian. "Aja" features a jazz-based chord progression and solos by saxophonist Wayne Shorter, drummer Steve Gadd, guitarist Denny Dias, and Becker. When Katz asked Shorter if he was interested in playing on a Steely Dan session, the answer was a resounding "no", but after Steely Dan had Shorter's colleague Dick LaPalm vouch for them, he agreed to do it.

After hearing the band on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Becker and Fagen were very impressed by one of their saxophonists and wanted him to play on "Deacon Blues". However, they did not know which saxophonist it was, so Katz brought in one after another until they figured out that the one they wanted was Pete Christlieb.

When recording "Home at Last", Becker and Fagen told the drummer, Bernard Purdie, that they did not want a typical Motown or Chicago style of shuffle. Purdie suggested "the Purdie Shuffle". Becker and Fagen had never heard of this shuffle, so Purdie explained that it had "a half-time feel that was funky and laid back but different from other shuffles", and they agreed to use it on the track.

"I Got the News" had been written during the sessions for The Royal Scam, but was dramatically rewritten by the time of Aja.

"Peg" was the final song recorded for Aja, and the only one recorded in New York instead of Los Angeles. Elliot Scheiner, whom Steely Dan had cut ties with in an acrimonious manner during the recording of their previous album, The Royal Scam, was forgiven and brought back in to engineer "Peg".

The sessions for Aja produced several outtakes, including "You Got the Bear", "Stand by the Seawall", and "Were You Blind that Day". The lyrics to "Were You Blind that Day" were later rewritten, and it became "Third World Man" from Steely Dan's next album, Gaucho. "Stand by the Seawall" is a standalone rendition of the instrumental which was ultimately repurposed as one of the movements in "Aja". "You Got the Bear" was never officially released in any form, but was played live on Steely Dan's 2011 Shuffle Diplomacy Tour.

Music and lyrics

According to Becker and Fagen, the electric funk song "Black Cow" was titled after one of the popular names for a root beer float. In a 1989 interview, Fagen hinted that the lyrics were about the breakup of one of his relationships: "A lot of time when a relationship ends or there's some sort of a crisis in a relationship one particular incident will stand out in your mind as you remember it; in this case, we thought that particular scene of this woman downing a black cow in a small luncheonette - the place where the shit hit the fan, so to speak - is what stood out in the narrator's mind. It was probably in Brooklyn, I would imagine."