The relaxing musician Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen called “perfect”
From the outset, it was clear that Steely Dan were to chart a path distinct from the traditional one. When they met at Bard College, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen might have been united in their love of weed and wild imaginations, but their pair also shared the same outlook. They hated the flower-power absurdity of the counterculture. Instead, they preferred the wry, boundary-pushing work of Frank Zappa and The Fugs, and, more importantly, the deeply cerebral essence of jazz.
Together, the pair would devise an outfit that blended jazz, rock, funk and experimentalism with sharp comedic lyrics, creating an ice-cool sound like no other. While they first found fame in the early 1970s, they have continued to resonate with audiences whose parents weren’t even around then. Their astute blending of opposites is deemed timeless, particularly in an era when doing so is counted as the absolute pinnacle of postmodernist art.
It seems that Fagen was always destined to live a life outside what was expected, philosophically and musically. A truly unique individual immune to archetypal pigeonholing, after his family moved to the New Jersey suburbs as a child, he hated the suffocating Eden offered and found solace in the rock ‘n’ roll rebellion.
Although he shared his generation’s outlook of rejecting the world of their parents, quickly, the young Fagen moved away from the hip-swinging guitar music to a much more exciting and complex world: jazz. Having his head turned by his older beatnik cousin, he delved into the nascent countercultural environment years before it was a cultural force and long before many of his school friends had developed mentally enough even to comprehend it. He was 11.
From then on, he became a self-described jazz snob and even attended the Newport Jazz Festival, surely making him their youngest-ever attendee. At 12, this young sonic wanderer cast his net further afield and started busing it to Manhattan to visit the Village Vanguard jazz club and watch the genre greats in action, including Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk and Charles Mingus. These gigs provided him with the education that would be foundational for Steely Dan.
As expected, Fagen has continued to do his thing until the present, and it manifests in myriad ways, including the musician he says relaxes him most, a man not famed for his chill vibe. When speaking to The Third Story Podcast in 2020, the surviving Steely Dan leader revealed that the musician he listens to at home when relaxing is bebop pioneer Charlie Parker. Celebrated for his fast tempo and general virtuosity, he’s not a popular choice for bedtime listening, but this is Donald Fagen.
“Charlie Parker relaxes me. I can put that on softly to go to sleep,” he revealed. “Still to this day, Charlie Parker is so radical that he can still clear a room at a party if someone puts it on. But to me, it’s like just so sweet, you know, bebop is so sweet. On one hand, it was like really the first instance of Black musicians not catering to the audience, you know, Dizzy Gillespie was sort of more of a liaison to the audience, but Charlie Parker just played that’s all he did.”
While there was clearly fury in Parker’s bebop, there was also what Fagen described as sweet “brotherly warmth”. He maintained that the melodies were particularly warm in nature and continue to pique his interest due to the late legend’s rapid pace bringing them to life.
Characteristically, Fagen concluded: “So, to me, it’s like the perfect music. It’s a shame that more people aren’t aware of it even to this day.”