Steely Dan ? Aja /?e???/ ? Rare 1977 ABC Records Near Mint Original LP

$

20

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1. "Peg"
   Released: November 1977
2. "Deacon Blues"
   Released: March 1978
3. "Josie"
   Released: August 1978

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Aja (/?e???/, pronounced Asia) is the sixth album by the jazz rock band Steely Dan. Originally released in 1977 on ABC Records, it became the group's best-selling album. The credits for Aja list nearly 40 musicians, as band leaders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker pushed Steely Dan further into experimenting with different combinations of session players.

Peaking at No. 3 on the U.S. charts and No. 5 in the United Kingdom, Aja was the band's first platinum album, eventually selling over 5 million copies. The record spawned a number of hit singles, including "Peg", "Deacon Blues", and "Josie".

In July 1978, the album won the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Non-Classical Recording. 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. The album is often cited as one of the best test recordings for audiophiles, due to its high production standards.

Background

Donald Fagen has said the album was named for a Korean woman who married the brother of one of his high-school friends. The cover photo by Hideki Fujii features Japanese model and actress Sayoko Yamaguchi and was designed by Phil Hartman.

The album features several leading session musicians. The eight-minute-long title track features jazz-based changes and a solo by saxophonist Wayne Shorter.

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.

Critical reception

Summarising the style of the band at the time Aja was released, music critic Andy Gill said in retrospect: "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." In a contemporary review of the album, Rolling Stone critic Michael Duffy felt that "the conceptual framework of their 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." 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".

Describing the album in 1999, British musician Ian Dury said: "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. 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... It's a record that sends my spirits up, and really when I listen to music, really that's what I want."

Analyzing the band's songwriting style, Dury said: "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." Dury said of their musical style: "Parker, Mingus, Blakey, I can hear in there... Jazz MessengersI can hear in there, Bobby Timmons... the subject matter doesn't matter, it's the sound they're making.

In 2014, internet music site Something Else, reviewing the track "Home At Last", 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."

Legacy

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. The album was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Aja is the subject of one of the Classic Albums, a series of documentaries about the making of famous albums. The documentary includes 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.

Track listing

All songs written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.