Legendary American group Steely Dan blended rock, pop, blues, jazz, country, folk and almost any other imaginable popular musical idiom – the compositional style of keyboard player and vocalist Donald Fagen, alongside his writing partner and guitarist Walter Becker had it all. Combine the pair’s considerable creative talents with an almost unfathomable A-list of the best of the best session musicians, literally queuing up to play on their recordings, with phenomenal production and you can see why their music has stood the test of time. And with over 40 million albums sold and an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame we see two further indications of their significance and popularity.
Steely Dan’s music manages to somehow combine accessibility with sophistication. Its intelligent lyrical content, incredible groove and feel blended with a harmonic sensibility, make it both bluesy and direct, and equally complex and involved. One consistent ingredient in the Dan sound is the now legendary ‘Mu’ voicing – essentially a major triad with added 2nd or 9th degree, voiced in a particular way, so that the 2nd and 3rd intervals are located adjacently, to create an intriguing and mildly dissonant cluster.
The intention was to introduce harmonic colour and interest, but in a way that avoided any overtly jazzy overtones, which would be almost impossible to avoid when building chords by the usual method of stacking 3rds (7ths, 9ths, 11ths and so on). Evidence of these voici.