Back in the 70s, when they were a fledging band with a couple hits under their collective belts, Steely Dan founders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen joked that they started a rock group because they “weren’t good enough to be jazz musicians.” Well, 40 years later with 10 classic albums with jazzers including (but not limited to ) Wayne Shorter, Phil Woods, Larry Carlton and the Brecker Brothers, Fagen and Brecker have become the state of the artists for jazz/rock, or fusion, or whatever you want to call it, and have made it sound smart, swinging and sophisticated as they made bop and pop look brainy during their 2 ½ hour set at the Nokia Theatre.
The piping hot backup band of 4 horns, keyboards, guitarist and bassist set the mood with a cooking take of a jazz classic “Blue Port.” Enter Fagen and Brecker, with the keyboardist informing us that they’d be performing the entire 1977 Aja album as a whole. With one of the 3 female vocalists putting a needle on the album to demonstrate what an album experience was like, the band kicked off into takes of “Black Cow,” Aja” and “Deacon Blues” that, unlike most rock concerts and like most jazz shows, the live music was multiple grades better than the studio, with a snapping rhythm section lead by Keith Carlock and Freddie Washington and horn section that went from R&B to swing at the drop of a fez.
At the last note of “Deacon Blues” vocalist Carolyn Leonart- Escoffrey went over to the turntable and flipped the album over as the band played Side Two, with a hipper than hep “Peg” and a slinky and funky “Jose” which made the classic album feel like a seamless Opus. After that, it was over an hour of fresh arrangements of well known hits like a smoky Joes Café-ish “Black Friday” or out of left field obscurities that finally get the light of day such as “Time Out Of Mind” or with the female vocalists bringing new hues to “Razor Boy.” A reading of “ Show Biz Kids” had some wondrously tricky licks, while the top 40 hits such as “Reelin’ In The Years” and “My Old School” sounded a bit nostalgic in light of the advanced and more sophisticated Aja material, still demonstrated that music made for radio doesn’t have to lower your IQ. How many songs are written about Charles the Great anymore? Like Kareem & Magic, Carlton & McCarver and Montana & Rice, some guys are just destined by God to face the world together. Brecker and Fagen showed tonight that 2 score years of symbiotically created music can satisfy the feat and gray matter, mixing Mensa with music onto a perfect scantron sheet.