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/%24%7B0%7D ), 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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Set Contains:
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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/%24%7B0%7D ), 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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