Steely Dan

Pioneering pop/jazz band Steely Dan, formed by Donald Fagen and Walter Backer in the early '70s, had already secured five U.S. 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 Number 3 on the U.S. Billboard chart, spending a year in the Top 40 there, and also reaching Number 5 in the U.K.Aja was the first British Top 10 hit for Steely Dan and also the first album by Becker and Fagen as a duo.

Partly because of Donald Fagen's reluctance to sing onstage, partly due to he and Walter Becker's perfectionism, and partly because the pairs' compositions and arrangements were so complex - requiring all manner of studio hardware to reproduce - Steely Dan played very few live concerts during their early career, indeed by the middle of 1974 they had given up touring entirely. The one album they did promote on the road however was their third masterpiece, the enigmatically titles 'Pretzel Logic', released in the USA on February 20th 1974. The tour started on March 9th, and this CD features the complete second show played by the group, at the University Of California the following night.

3 CD COLLECTION OF THE FINEST AVALABLE LIVE STEELY DAN RECORDINGS As extraordinary as the music of Steely Dan remains, the how and why of it all coming about is stranger still. The joining forces of two nerdy students - one an English Lit. major, the other a musical prodigy in the late 1960s could hardly be seen as the most promising recipe for success, nevermind a springboard for the creation of perhaps the most unique, creative, musically adventurous, enormously listenable and downright joyous run of albums in the entire history of pop music. But despite it all that was what the mighty Dan achieved during the 1970s and beyond, and as those records continue to inspire just about everyone who hears them, the mystery remains.

Gaucho is the seventh studio album by the American jazz rock band Steely Dan, released on November 21, 1980 by MCA Records. The sessions for Gaucho represent the band's typical penchant for studio perfectionism and obsessive recording technique. To record the album, the band used at least 42 different musicians, spent over a year in the studio, and far exceeded the original monetary advance given by the record label. Gaucho marked a significant stylistic change for Steely Dan, introducing a more minimal, groove and atmosphere-based format. The harmonically complex chord changes that were a distinctive mark of earlier Steely Dan songs are less prominent on Gaucho, with the record's songs tending to revolve around a single rhythm or mood, although complex chord progressions were still present particularly in "Babylon Sisters" and "Glamour Profession". Gaucho proved to be Steely Dan's final studio album before a 20-year hiatus from the recording industry.